“Upheld by Force” Sylvia Pankhurst’s Sedition of 1920

Edward Crouse Undergraduate Thesis Department of History Columbia University

April 4, 2018

Seminar Advisor: Elizabeth Blackmar Second Reader: Susan Pedersen

With dim lights and tangled circumstance they tried to shape their thought and deed in noble agreement; but after all, to common eyes their struggles seemed mere inconsistency and formlessness; for these later-born Theresas were helped by no coherent social faith and order which could perform the function of knowledge for the ardently willing soul. Their ardor alternated between a vague ideal and the common yearning of womanhood; so that the one was disapproved as extravagance, and the other condemned as a lapse.

– George Eliot, Middlemarch, 1872

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................... 2 Abbreviations ............................................................................................................................ 3 Introduction .............................................................................................................................. 4 The End of Edwardian England: Pankhurst’s Political Development ................................. 12 After the War: Pankhurst’s Collisions with Communism and the State .............................. 21 Appealing Sedition: Performativity of Communism and Suffrage ....................................... 33 Prison and Release: Attempted Constructions of Martyrology ............................................ 46 Conclusions ............................................................................................................................. 58 Bibliography ............................................................................................................................ 62

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Acknowledgements

Now at the end of my undergraduate education, I have a slew of professors within the

history department I would like to thank for their wisdom and guidance throughout my time at

Columbia. I am incredibly grateful to have been in Professor Blackmar’s thesis seminar, as she not

only provided considerate and novel feedback, but also projected a genuine enthusiasm for my

own and others’ thesis topics that brightened up the December and January slogs. To that end, I

would also like to thank my second reader, Professor Pedersen, for her comprehensive insights

and recommendations regarding everything historically under the sun, and most importantly for

sticking with my endeavors since Fall 2016 (or Fall 2015 if also counting “British History From

1867”). Over the summer, Professors Coleman and Phillips, in the PGIF Workshop and the Cold

War Archives Fellowship, introduced me to the true business of archival research, providing

methodologies that became crucial for the work I have done. And finally, Professor Pizzigoni’s

Colonial Latin America course, which I took my very first semester here, served as the gateway to

all my experiences at Columbia.

Having spent the past year and a half researching this turn-of-the-20th-century British

suffragette, I would like to give thanks to my friends and family, in particular my parents (both

history majors) and my brother (likely future history major), for putting up with my incessant

rambling and lamentably overwritten style.

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Abbreviations

BSP British Socialist Party

CP(BSTI) Communist Party (British Section of the Third International)

CPGB Communist Party of Great Britain

DORA Defence of the Realm Act(s)

ELFS East London Federation of Suffragettes

ILP Independent Labour Party

SLP Socialist Labour Party

WSF WSPU

Women’s Suffrage Federation, later Workers’ Suffrage Federation, later Workers’ Socialist Federation Women’s Social and Political Union

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Introduction Only this age that loudly boasts Reform,

Had set its seal of vengeance ‘gainst the mind, Decreeing naught in prison shall be writ,

Save on a cold slate, and swiftly washed away.1 – Sylvia Pankhurst, 1921

On Monday October 18th, 1920, Inspector Lionel Kirchnez of the Scotland Yard Special

Branch entered the premises of a small organization now calling itself the Communist Party-British

Section of the Third International at 152 Fleet Street in the City of London. He seized several party

documents, including an edition of the group’s paper, the Workers’ Dreadnought, published that

past Saturday, October 16th. Kirchnez then proceeded down the block to the Dreadnought’s

publishing office at 10 Wine Office Court. There, he saw a woman writing in the composing room.

Stopping her, he held up the confiscated newspaper and asked if she held herself responsible for

it. That woman, Sylvia Pankhurst, replied, “Yes, I certainly do.” As the inspector began searching

amongst the workshop manuscripts for a letter of sensitive information from Pankhurst’s informant

in the Navy, she told him, “If you are looking for [the] letter, you won’t find it, because I

anticipated a visit from the police.”2

The next day, City Police Detective Hugo Smith along with two other officers dressed in

plain clothes arrested Sylvia Pankhurst at the printing office. 3 As they read aloud her warrant, she

asked, “Are there any more to come to this?” The following day, Pankhurst was charged before

Sir Alfred Newton at the Mansion House for violating Regulation 42 of the Defence of the Realm

Act, which proscribed any “act calculated or likely to cause sedition or disaffection among any of

1 E. Sylvia Pankhurst Papers, International Institute of Social History (Amsterdam), microfilm (henceforth Pankhurst Papers), reel 307, Writ on a Cold Slate, 1921 (manuscript), p. 5. 2 Pankhurst Papers, reel 254, “Appeal of Miss Sylvia Pankhurst against sentence of six months imprisonment […] for articles in the Workers’ Dreadnought,” October 1920 (trial transcript), p. 10. 3 The National Archives (London), HO/144/1697/414256, The Dispatch, Oct. 20, 1920 (clipping).

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His Majesty’s forces, or among the civilian population.”4 Specifically, as editor of the

Dreadnought, Pankhurst was held responsible for three articles: “Discontent on the Lower Deck”

by a radical English sailor named Dave Springhall (under the alias Hunter), “How to Get a Labour

Government” by a Soviet spy, Veltheim (under the alias Rubinstein), and “The Yellow Peril and

the Dockers” by Jamaican revolutionary and writer Claude McKay (alias Leon Lopez).5 Appearing

for the Director of Public Prosecutions, Travers Humphreys told the alderman, “I shall ask you to

look over the paper, but I should be sorry to nauseate you by reading the whole of it to you.”6

On the day of her trial, October 28th, as Pankhurst entered the court with a bouquet of red

carnations, she reportedly looked “very pale… but gained colour.”7 After Pankhurst delivered her

own defense, including introducing as exhibits letters she had written to Vladimir Lenin that week,

Alderman Newton declared that “the punishment of six months’ imprisonment which I pass on

you is quite inadequate.” But, as the Labour-affiliated newspaper The Daily Herald reported:

The Alderman again referred to treason felony [sic], and mentioned the words “hard labour,” but after a whispered consultation with the clerk, he added: “Having regard to your sex, I order it to be in the second division.”8

Pankhurst appealed this decision, with a second trial scheduled for January 1921 and an agreement

not to participate in the Dreadnought or any political meeting.9 In her editorial absence, the

Dreadnought proclaimed, “Let us be of good cheer. Other comrades must try to carry on Sylvia

Pankhurst’s work until she is released. The arm of the capitalist is heavy and strong. It is put forth

to crush the revolutionary workers and their leaders. Let us brace ourselves for the battle.”10

4 TNA, HO/144/1697/414256, The Daily Telegraph, Oct. 21, 1920 (clipping). 5 Barbara Winslow, Sylvia Pankhurst. Sexual Politics and Political Activism (London: University College London Press, 1996), pp. 127-28. 6 TNA, HO/144/1697/414256, The Daily Telegraph, Oct. 21, 1920 (clipping). 7 TNA, HO/144/1697/414256, The Daily Herald, Oct. 29, 1920 (clipping). 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid. 10 “Sylvia Pankhurst Arrested,” Workers’ Dreadnought, Oct. 23, 1920.

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Sylvia Pankhurst was born in Manchester in 1882 to Richard and Emmeline Pankhurst.

The middle sibling between the elder sister, Christabel, and two younger siblings, Adela and Harry,

Sylvia grew up in a family immersed in international socialist and feminist politics. Until his death

in 1898, Richard Pankhurst cultivated a wide-ranging network extending from intellectual William

Morris and trade unionist Tom Mann to feminist Harriot Stanton Blatch and sexual radical Annie

Besant. Sylvia pursued an art education, first in Manchester and then in London. There, she began

a decade-long relationship with her parents’ friend, James Keir Hardie, the Scottish working-class

union organizer who had founded the Independent Labour Party (ILP) to become Parliament’s first

Labour representative. During this time, Emmeline and Christabel continued their engagement

with the Manchester ILP branch. However, they ultimately abandoned the ILP due to widespread

misogyny amongst its leadership and founded the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU)

in 1903. They shortly drew Sylvia into the organization, and she became an ardently militant

“suffragette” who participated in the rallies, marches, and public disruptions that frequently

resulted in police intervention. Sylvia, like her mother and other militants, was arrested by the

police and hunger struck in prison. Sylvia formed the East London Federation of Suffragettes

(ELFS) in 1913 as a subsidiary part of the WSPU and, due to severe family tensions, shortly cut

her branch off from her family’s and launched the Women’s Dreadnought.11

During the rest of the decade, she devoted herself to a wide array of causes, including

assistance of working-class women and pacifism during the First World War. A socialist, Sylvia

became emboldened by the Bolshevik Revolution. Transforming her organization and newspaper

respectively into the Workers’ Socialist Federation and the Workers’ Dreadnought, Pankhurst

entangled herself in the intense personal politics of British and international communists. By 1920,

11 Winslow, Sylvia Pankhurst, pp. 1-66.

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the various communist organizations within the country were scrambling to unite and form the

British Communist Party that would be officially linked to the Third Communist International.

Pankhurst herself traveled to Moscow in the summer of that year to attend the Communist

International, where she publicly debated Lenin over which principles the British party should

adopt. When she returned to London in the fall of 1920, she continued presiding over the

Dreadnought.12

Coinciding with Pankhurst’s peak engagement and subsequent expulsion from British

communist circles, her 1920 sedition charge and its fallout allow for unique consideration of the

impact of the suffragette movement, left-wing radicalism, and state censorship of political dissent

in interwar Britain. In particular, this thesis argues that the sedition episode demonstrates

Pankhurst’s ultimate inability to transplant claims to a prewar political authority of gendered and

religious romanticism into a postwar context dominated by masculinized radicalism and

emboldened state repression. Before and during the war, Pankhurst’s political celebrity achieved

various levels of success, having been aesthetically influenced by the utopian romanticism of her

family’s circles and the WSPU, as well as tactically developed by the suffrage movement and her

home-front activities. But her leftward shift in ideology after the Russian Revolution increasingly

placed her in opposition to other radicals who did not share the same aesthetic and tactical

approach. At the start of the interwar period, Pankhurst occupied a paradoxical position in which

her illusorily outsized influence set her into conflict with fellow communists and the British

government. The sedition episode enabled her political opponents and the government to move

against Pankhurst. In her absence the other communists unified without her and later expelled her

from their party, while the government consistently rejected Pankhurst’s appeals and petitions

12 Ibid., pp. 75-127.

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during the trial and imprisonment. As such, this thesis examines the ways in which both British

communism and the state in the immediate interwar period were unreceptive to the self-

presentation and political celebrity of women radicals.

Indeed, Pankhurst’s contributions to British communism have only recently been

reintegrated into the historiography. Historians first focused solely on British “Bolshevism” and

even more narrowly, the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). In doing so, they reduced or

ignored the activities and ideologies of heterodox communists. Consequently, in Pelling’s

historical profile of the CPGB, Pankhurst vanishes after page 20 as the “little British party thus

deprived itself of the services of one of its most energetic propagandists.”13 Uninspired by such

exclusivity, other historians sought to broaden the field. Shipway remarks that because

communists like Pankhurst clashed with the CPGB, “This enables historians of the CPGB to

portray the Dreadnought group as an ‘infantile’ tributary flowing into the Leninist mainstream,

later to emerge as an effluent which disappears into the void.”14 Treating anti-parliamentary

communism in its own right, Shipway analyzes the development of those like Pankhurst and Guy

Aldred, who rejected parliamentarianism and instead advocated local soviet councils. Bringing all

the British communists back together, Bullock emphasizes the allure of the “myth of soviet

democracy” in legitimizing Soviet Russia for both British Bolshevists and their dissenters.15

Pankhurst features prominently in these works, but her 1920-21 sedition sentence does not, to the

detriment of ignoring a pivotal episode that contextualizes Pankhurst’s ideology within interwar

communism.

13 Henry Pelling, The British Communist Party: A Historical Profile (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1958), p. 20. 14 Mark Shipway, Anti-Parliamentary Communism. The Movement for Workers’ Councils in Britain, 1917-45 (London: The Macmillan Press Ltd., 1988), p. xii. 15 Ian Bullock, Romancing the Revolution: The Myth of Soviet Democracy and the British Left (Edmonton: Athabasca University Press, 2014), ProQuest Ebook Central, p. 8.

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Pankhurst’s sedition case was a peacetime conviction using wartime emergency powers.

Several historians, such as Cotter, Ewing, Gearty, and Simpson, have traced the legal history of

civil liberties in 20th century Britain.16 In particular, they view the First World War with the

accompanying Defence of the Realm Act (DORA) as the turning point, where Parliament gave the

executive branch near unrestrained emergency power. Other historians like Andrew, Townshend,

and Morgan have analyzed the transformation of these emergency powers during the unrest of the

interwar period.17 Pankhurst occupies a unique space within this history. Her case stayed at the

initial magistrate level, and she did not belong to a trade union. Consequently, her case does not

fall into the scope of major court cases or industrial strikes that are these works’ focus. However,

Pankhurst was arrested under DORA in the midst of a coal strike and unemployment riot at the

same time that Parliament was rushing through new emergency legislation. Her case must

therefore be considered within this history to understand the ways in which the executive and

judicial branches of the government treated Pankhurst’s sedition.

The sedition episode developed in accordance with Pankhurst’s gendered political

celebrity. Historian Laura Beers draws upon a framework for understanding political celebrity and

gender. An “affective affinity” exists between the public and the celebrity, the belief that “the

celebrity is somehow both like them and above them.” And the female political celebrity must

16 Cornelius Cotter, “Constitutionalizing Emergency Powers: The British Experience,” Stanford Law Review 5, no. 3 (Apr. 1953): pp. 382-417, https://doi.org/10.2307/1226448; K. D. Ewing and C. A. Gearty, The Struggle for Civil Liberties: Political Freedom and the Rule of Law in Britain, 1914-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), Oxford Scholarship Online; A. W. Brian Simpson, In the Highest Degree Odious: Detention Without Trial in Wartime Britain (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), Oxford Scholarship Online. 17 Christopher Andrew, Her Majesty’s Secret Service: The Making of the British Intelligence Community (New York: Viking, 1985); Charles Townshend, Making the Peace: Public Order and Public Security in Modern Britain (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Jane Morgan, Conflict and Order: The Police and Labour Disputes in England and Wales, 1900-1939 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987).

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contend with the gendered assumptions developed societally and sustained by the media.18

Pankhurst’s political celebrity developed out of the 19th century utopian Romanticism her parents

espoused. During the suffrage movement, it aligned especially well with the gendered roles for

women: emotional feeling, religious conviction, and tightknit communality.19 But Pankhurst

attempted to maintain this identity beyond the suffrage movement into her postwar communist

activity. Ross McKibbin explains that because of sexual division of labor, “the social world of the

organized working class was sectional, collectivist, and masculine.”20 In Landscape for a Good

Woman, Carolyn Steedman describes how Labour’s patriarchal assumptions and lack of interest

in women’s perspectives led Steedman’s working-class mother to the Conservative Party.21

Additionally, the majority of British communist leadership (nearly all male) eagerly accepted

Lenin as their leader, who historian Patricia Romero notes was “contemptuous towards women.”22

Therefore, if the political circles of working-class labor and communism were dominated by men,

then Pankhurst’s approach put her at odds with the expectations of her colleagues in their quest to

install communism within Britain.

18 Laura Beers, “A Model MP?: Ellen Wilkinson, Gender, Politics and Celebrity Culture in Interwar Britain,” Cultural and Social History 10, no. 2 (2013): p. 233, doi:10.2752/147800413X13591373275321. 19 Denise Riley, “Am I That Name?”: Feminism and the Category of “Women” in History, (Basingstoke, England: Macmillan Press, 1988); Laura Mayhall, “Defining Militancy: Radical Protest, the Constitutional Idiom, and Women’s Suffrage in Britain, 1908-1908,” Journal of British Studies 39, no. 3 (2000): pp. 340-71, http://www.jstor.org/stable/175976; Kabi Hartman, “‘What made me a suffragette’: The New Woman and the New (?) Conversion Narrative,” Women’s History Review 12, no. 1 (2003): pp. 35-50, https://doi.org/10.1080/09612020300200346; and June Purvis, “The Prison Experiences of the Suffragettes in Edwardian Britain,” Women’s History Review 4, no. 1 (1995): pp. 103-133, https://doi.org/10.1080/09612029500200073. 20 Ross McKibbin, The Ideologies of Class: Social Relations in Britain 1880-1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 285. 21 Carolyn Kay Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives, 8th ed. (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2006) pp. 9, 47. 22 Patricia Romero, E. Sylvia Pankhurst: Portrait of a Radical (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), p. 146.

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Though Pankhurst’s biographers have of course discussed this appeal trial, they have

provided only a cursory treatment of it. Ian Bullock and Richard Pankhurst’s Sylvia Pankhurst:

From Artist to Anti-Fascist devotes barely a paragraph to it.23 In the considerably longer biography

E. Sylvia Pankhurst: Portrait of a Radical, Patricia Romero remarks:

Sylvia argued her own case… and was clearly a disturbed woman at this juncture. Instead of discussing the two articles for which she was convicted, she read long rambling excerpts from other Dreadnought articles… And she was dramatic: pleading frail health (which was true of her mental state).24

Romero’s parenthetical interpretation of Pankhurst merely as a “disturbed” woman does a

disservice to the complex but consistent way she presented herself in the trial. Barbara Winslow

goes the furthest of her biographers in treating the trial seriously, writing that “Pankhurst defended

herself, using her trial as a platform for her ideals and reviving the old Pankhurst fireworks.”25

There is more to be said.

23 Ian Bullock, “Sylvia Pankhurst and the Russian Revolution: the making of a ‘Left-wing’ Communist,” in Sylvia Pankhurst: From Artist to Anti-Fascist, ed. Ian Bullock and Richard Pankhurst (Basingstoke, England: Macmillan, 1992), p. 142. 24 Romero, Portrait of a Radical, p. 151. 25 Winslow, Sylvia Pankhurst, p. 131.

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The End of Edwardian England: Pankhurst’s Political Development

Pankhurst’s political identity developed in accordance with personal influences and in

reaction to government measures. Raised in a vibrantly political, literary, and artistic household,

Pankhurst adopted fervent socialist and feminist convictions rooted in Victorian-era romanticism.

And as her mother and sister launched the Women’s Social and Political Union in Manchester,

Pankhurst divided her time between her art education and their London branch. Suffragette

militancy, in accordance with the motto “deeds, not words,” operated on conviction, exposing

women’s political oppression within the country. Initially contemptuous of the suffragettes, the

government found itself awkwardly needing to accommodate the well-connected and performative

upper-class women in the movement. But when the First World War erupted, the movement

crumbled, and Britain slipped away from Victorian-Edwardian liberalism towards coercive rule

by emergency power. Once separated from her family, Pankhurst pursued causes like working-

class assistance and pacifism during the war that kept her in conflict with authority. Ultimately,

Pankhurst’s politics shifted further leftward, shaped by the First World War, the Irish War of

Independence, and the Russian Revolution. This transformation, coinciding with her increasingly

negative perception of the government, set the foundation for her tumultuous position in the

postwar period culminating in the 1920 seditious arrest.

In 1903, to counter the increasing hostility from the male leadership of the Independent

Labour Party (ILP) towards women’s suffrage and general political participation, Emmeline and

Christabel Pankhurst, along with several other women in the party, formed the Women’s Social

and Political Union (WSPU) in Manchester. During this initial period of the WSPU, Sylvia

maintained some involvement in its activities. But she focused primarily on her art studies

following her enrollment at the Royal College of Art in London in 1904. Once in London, she

entered the social circle of her parents’ friends, among them James Keir Hardie. She began a sexual

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relationship with Hardie in 1904 that lasted a decade. This relationship stoked personal and

political tensions between her and Emmeline and Christabel, who grew more distrustful of the

male-dominated Labour movement. In 1903 in an article for the ILP News, Christabel had asked,

“Why are women expected to have… confidence in the men of the Labour Party?”, and by 1906

she and Emmeline had cut the WSPU’s ties with the ILP.26

Although through Richard, Emmeline and Christabel had somewhat engaged in Fabianism

and socialism, they now subordinated all political issues under “the Cause” of obtaining the vote.

Influenced by sentimentalist and romantic ideologies such as in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle

Tom’s Cabin and Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution, Emmeline shaped the WSPU around

commitment towards passionate quests of historical upheaval.27 To do so, the WSPU adopted a

wide range of tactics typical of 19th century male radical movements, such as rallies, marches, and

disruptions of other political meetings.28 And like these male movements, such as Keir Hardie’s

ILP, the WSPU embraced a vibrant religiosity.29 The group’s weaponization of these tactics was

particularly effective because they were transposed into a highly gendered context. As separate

spheres for men and women solidified in the 18th and 19th centuries, religiosity, or the intense piety

“tarnished by sentiment and excess” as Denise Riley describes it, became “unambiguously

feminized.”30 It was precisely this religious femininity that the WSPU mobilized as an ideological

filter for their acts of militancy: protests, property destruction, imprisonment, and hunger-striking.

The WSPU framed the ultimate political goal of suffrage by way of a “necessary spiritual

26 Winslow, Sylvia Pankhurst, pp. 3-7. 27 Sandra Stanley Holton, “In Sorrowful Wrath: Suffrage Militancy and the Romantic Feminism of Emmeline Pankhurst,” in British Feminism in the Twentieth Century, ed. Harold L. Smith (Aldershot, Hants, England: Edward Elgar Publishing, 1990), pp. 8-14. 28 Mayhall, “Defining Militancy,” p. 344. 29 Hartman, “What made me a suffragette,” p. 37. 30 Riley, Am I That Name, p. 19.

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victory.”31 To that end, measures such as the development of a “suffragette conversion narrative”

genre and the proliferation of suffragette martyrology furthered the movement’s aim as gendered

performative activism designed to allow “women to put themselves on display for other women,”

drawing individuals into the “Cause” and establishing a tight-knit communality.32

In 1905, Christabel and mill worker Annie Kenney became two of the first WSPU members

to be arrested after having disrupted a Liberal Party meeting. The following year, Sylvia’s

scholarship ended, and she decided to dedicate herself fulltime to the WSPU. She contributed her

artistry, designing pins, emblems, posters, and even a fully-fledged exhibit hall. That same year,

in 1906, she was arrested for the first time for “abusive language” and sent to Holloway for two

weeks. Profoundly shaped by her first prison experience, she published an exposé about the squalid

conditions in Holloway, in contravention of Christabel’s demands to keep attention focused on

suffrage alone.33 As WSPU militants, including Sylvia and her mother, increasingly began hunger-

striking in prison, the government response of forced feeding proved disastrous. To mitigate the

public uproar over use of the invasive and oppressive tactic on primarily middle-class women,

Parliament passed the Prisoners (Temporary Discharge for Ill Health) Act in 1913.34 Under this

“Cat and Mouse” Act, Sylvia was released and re-imprisoned eight times between February 1913

until August 1914, conducting a hunger strike each time.35

Sylvia returned to London after a two-year tour in America with a renewed commitment

towards combining working-class and women’s movements. Coordinating with American

31 Purvis, “Prison Experiences of the Suffragettes,” p. 107. 32 Hartman, “What made me a suffragette,” pp. 35-36; Barbara Green, Spectacular Confessions: Autobiography, Performative Activism, and the Sites of Suffrage, 1905-1938 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), pp. 56-57 in Mayhall, “Defining Militancy,” p. 341n4. 33 Winslow, Sylvia Pankhurst, pp. 9-12. 34 Leon Radzinowicz and Roger Hood, “The Status of Political Prisoner in England: The Struggle for Recognition,” Virginia Law Review 65, no. 8 (1979): pp. 1476-77, doi:10.2307/1072581. 35 Winslow, Sylvia Pankhurst, p. 55.

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settlement house leader Zelie Emerson, she established the East London Federation of the

Suffragettes (ELFS) in 1912 as a constituent branch of the WSPU. The East End of London had

long been considered among the city’s poorest areas as it contained the capital’s docks, textile

workshops, and chemical industries. Though initially connected to the WSPU, the ELFS differed

significantly with respect to its goals, tactics, and composition. It operated democratically,

collaborated enthusiastically with Labour, and expanded beyond women’s suffrage towards

devoting financial and material relief for the East London working class.36

These differences coincided with the ever-growing personal and political tensions amongst

the Pankhurst family. At the end of 1913, Sylvia served as a speaker for a socialist trade union

rally on the Irish labor dispute known as the Dublin lockout. The breaking point for Christabel

occurred when Sylvia took the platform with men and delivered an acclaimed speech on Irish labor

conflict. She summoned Sylvia to sever WSPU-ELFS ties at the start of 1914. Now on its own,

the ELFS increased its activities, reaching prominence in the summer of 1914. Sylvia, a “mouse”

during this period, declared she would conduct a hunger, thirst, and sleep strike in and out of prison

until Liberal Prime Minister Asquith agreed to a deputation. Swayed by political pressure, he

received ELFS working-class members in his first suffrage-related deputation. He promised he

would give the issue “careful consideration,” and Chancellor of the Exchequer David Lloyd

George offered to introduce a Private Member’s Bill. But the First World War erupted weeks later,

and the government promptly tossed suffrage aside.37

War broke out on August 4th, 1914, sending government and society into frenzy.

Historiography is divided over the extent to which the British government was actually prepared

for the war. Historian Cornelius Cotter insists there was no “carefully planned scheme of

36 Ibid., pp. 19-43. 37 Ibid., pp. 63-74.

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emergency powers,” writing instead that its beginning stage “was a period of groping for answers

to the difficult questions posed by war emergency.”38 After an initial Privy Council proclamation

on August 4th of the King’s “undoubted prerogative… to take all such measures as may be

necessary,” the government began its haphazard mobilization of legal protocol.39 As Cotter

describes, it “was a hurriedly devised translation of martial rule and prerogative concepts into

statutory provisions.”40 Specifically, with the first Defense of the Realm Act (DORA), Parliament

gave the government the ability to regulate the military “for securing the public safety and the

defence of the realm.”41 It also allowed the government to establish trial by courts-martial and

punish anyone disobeying regulations designed: 1. “to prevent persons communicating with the

enemy or obtaining information for that purpose or any purpose calculated to jeopardise the

success of the operations of any of His Majesty’s forces or to assist the enemy;” and 2. “to secure

the safety of any means of communication, or of railways, docks or harbours…”42 Because this

first DORA was a rushed, vague measure, subsequent amending acts were passed to fill in the gaps

and resolve contradictions of the initial legislation.

The Defence of the Realm Consolidation Act, passed later that same year, extended the

executive’s power to issue regulations concerning not just the military but ultimately all elements

of British society in the name of “securing the public safety.”43 Ewing and Gearty in The Struggle

for Civil Liberties critique the law’s overwhelming legal and political implications: “[It] conferred

so wide a discretion as effectively to give an unlimited power to enable the executive to do as it

38 Cornelius Cotter, “Constitutionalizing Emergency Powers: The British Experience,” Stanford Law Review 5, no. 3 (Apr. 1953): p. 383, https://doi.org/10.2307/1226448. 39 London Times, Aug. 1914, p. 3, col. 3, in ibid. 40 Ibid., p. 384. 41 Ibid. 42 Defence of the Realm Act, 1914, 4 & 5 Geo. 5, c. 63, in ibid., p. 385. 43 Ibid., p. 386.

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wished.”44 Other acts further eroded civil liberties with the Aliens Restriction Act of 1914 allowing

the government unfettered control over migration, the National Registration Act of 1915

establishing a national register of all people in Britain, and the Military Service Act of 1916

introducing military conscription.45 Cotter, Ewing, and Gearty thus correctly claim that WWI was

British democracy’s “most serious crisis” and that the Defence of the Realm Regulations posed a

constitutional threat to civil liberties.46 Yet, as Townshend has pointed out, popular militarism

enabled these acts: “National sentiment, not government, was the architect of this revolution.”47

Evaluating the tangible applications of DORA over the course of its existence is difficult

as the government operated in secrecy. It did not even provide Parliament copies of the regulations

until 1916.48 Members of Parliament had to use the procedural “question period” to ask about

DORA, thereby learning that 34 British subjects had been tried by the army and 36 subjects

detained without warrant by February 1916.49 A. W. Brian Simpson, in In the Highest Degree

Odious, establishes that “just under 30,000 enemy aliens” were detained through DORA during

the war.50 DORA was also severely applied by the government during the Irish War of

Independence from 1916 to 1922 (ultimately lying outside the scope of this paper), with 187 Irish

tried under regulation 42 by court-martial (excluding those conducted in civil procedures).51 The

Gazette cites nearly a million DORA arrests, including 11 executions of individuals charged with

44 Ewing and Gearty, The Struggle for Civil Liberties, p. 91. 45 Ibid., p. 37. 46 Ibid., p. 90. 47 Charles Townshend, Making the Peace, p. 61. 48 Cotter, “Constitutionalizing Emergency Powers,” p. 389. 49 Ibid., p. 390. 50 Simpson, In the Highest Degree Odious, p. 15. 51 “The state, the law and political imprisonment, 1914-1918,” Century of Ireland. Accessed December 4, 2017. http://www.rte.ie/centuryireland/index.php/articles/the-state-the-law-and-political-imprisonment-1914-1918.

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espionage.52 During the war, the government had been particularly concerned about a potential

German infiltration. To that end, measures like the Alien Restriction Act 1914 sought to constrict

migrant access, while the infamous Regulation 14B of June 1915 permitted executive detention

without trial for any British subject “of hostile origin or associations.”53 Similarly, the government

hunted down the pacifist movement, which grew from relative obscurity at the start of the war to

over 650,000 members in 1917.54 These groups operated through the distribution of pamphlets,

publication of newspapers, and organization of public events, provoking government surveillance,

arrest of prominent leadership, and raids on publication offices.55

Within this context, Pankhurst led her organization to its apex of activity as it transformed

from the working-class women’s political organization, the ELFS, into the Workers’ Suffrage

Federation (WSF), a socialist and pacifist network providing welfare services.56 In March 1914

before the war, the ELFS had launched its weekly newspaper, the Woman’s Dreadnought.57 It

covered wide-ranging topics on the war: exposing squalid working conditions in women’s work

factories, calling for government control of the food supply, and publishing anti-war accounts by

English poet Siegfried Sassoon and German Marxist Karl Liebknecht.58 The Dreadnought

published its most influential work in the aftermath of the 1916 Irish Easter Rebellion, in which

Irish independence groups rose up against increasingly oppressive wartime British rule. Pankhurst

52 “World War 1: Defence of the Realm Act | The Gazette.” Accessed December 4, 2017. https://www.thegazette.co.uk/all-notices/content/217. 53 Simpson, In the Highest Degree Odious, p. 12. 54 Ewing and Gearty, The Struggle for Civil Liberties, p. 63. 55 Ibid., pp. 63-64. 56 Winslow, Sylvia Pankhurst, p. 77. 57 Given Pankhurst’s and the paper’s unyielding pacifism during the war, it seems a little curious that the leadership would agree to a title referencing the battleship class whose buildup helped lead European countries to war. For the paper’s part though, it declared its name to be “symbolic of the fact that the women who are fighting for freedom must fear nothing.” Woman’s Dreadnought, March 8, 1914. 58 Winslow, Sylvia Pankhurst, pp. 79, 91, 103.

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published the account of ELFS-WSF member Patricia Lynch, who managed to sneak into

Dublin—closed off by the English—and write a sympathetic account of the Irish.59 Additionally,

Pankhurst and the organization initiated a variety of services to assist the East End community,

including cost-price restaurants, annual Christmas parties for children, and a toy factory to employ

women. Pankhurst participated in numerous rallies and demonstrations. On April 8th, 1916, she

and the WFS organized one of the largest anti-war demonstrations up to that point. Attended by

20,000, the Trafalgar Square rally galvanized support for universal suffrage and the repeal of

wartime legislation.60

The Russian Revolutions in 1917 transformed Pankhurst’s radicalism by developing her

already antagonistic relationship with the state into fully-fledged anti-parliamentarianism. In the

February Revolution, revolutionaries forced the tsar’s abdication and established a system of “dual

power” between the constitutional Provisional Government and the Petrograd Soviet. In the

Dreadnought, Pankhurst heralded the new government, which established universal suffrage (in

contrast to a Franchise Bill in Britain to extend suffrage only to property-owning women over the

age of 30) and seemed eager to sue for peace.61 As it became apparent that the Petrograd Soviet

and the Bolsheviks in particular held power within the country, Pankhurst and the WSF voiced

support for them, especially Lenin. Over the summer, the organization changed its newspaper’s

name from the Woman’s Dreadnought to the Workers’ Dreadnought, later applauding the results

of the October Revolution.62 Initially, the aftermath of the October Revolution appealed to

Pankhurst because of the Bolsheviks’ pacifistic insistence on “no annexations, no indemnities.”

The Dreadnought called for international recognition of the new Russian state, and Bolshevik

59 Ibid., p. 102. 60 Ibid., p. 85. 61 Ibid., p. 100; Shipley, Anti-Parliamentary Communism, p. 33. 62 Winslow, Sylvia Pankhurst, p. 104; Shipley, Anti-Parliamentary Communism, p. 35.

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policy began to mold Pankhurst’s beliefs.63 The Bolsheviks dissolved the constituent assembly

created in the February Revolution. This act demonstrated to Pankhurst the fundamental lack of

necessity for parliamentarianism and the supremacy of local soviets. Changing the Workers’

Suffrage Federation to the Workers’ Socialist Federation in 1918, she increasingly adopted an anti-

parliamentarian position fully developed by 1919.64

On October 28th, 1918, Pankhurst ran afoul of DORA. Her pacifism and socialism

emboldened by the Bolshevik revolution, Pankhurst delivered a speech near a military

encampment in Creswell, Derbyshire, in which she the secret “capitalist” Allied treaties released

by the Bolsheviks after taking power. She called upon the working class to demand peace from

the government and suggested that a soldiers’ strike might not be “far off.” Pankhurst advised the

government “to be a little wiser, or the soldiers will take it on themselves.”65 She was arrested for

inciting sedition and brought to the local magistrates. She defended her actions as not any less

seditious than the publication of the secret treaties by other British newspapers. The bench

nonetheless found her guilty and fined her £50.66 Later that week in Parliament, Liberal MP Joseph

King asked “whether the Government has taken any decision to suppress the advocacy of Socialist

opinions.” The Home Office instructed the Home Secretary to answer the question “in negative.”67

Pankhurst’s DORA conviction, based on her socialist and antiwar rhetoric aimed at soldiers,

revealed the government’s growing postwar fear.

63 Shipley, Anti-Parliamentary Communism, pp. 36-37. 64 Winslow, Sylvia Pankhurst, pp. 104-105; Shipley, Anti-Parliamentary Communism, pp. 6-7. 65 TNA, HO/144/1558/234191, Sheffield Daily Telegraph, October 29, 1918 (clipping). 66 Ibid. 67 TNA, HO/144/1558/234191, “Miss Sylvia Pankhurst,” Oct. 30, 1918 (HO meeting minutes).

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After the War: Pankhurst’s Collisions with Communism and the State

In the immediate postwar period, the Russian Revolution and the end of the First World

War emboldened British communists seeking to unify under a single organization. Economic

downturn, war weariness, and the uneven transition to peacetime fomented unrest within the

country. As mutinies broke out and industrial strikes loomed, the British government scrambled to

develop coherent (and legal) responses to these emergency threats. In the midst of communist unity

negotiations and political agitation, Pankhurst occupied a contradictory position. Her organization

had decreased in size since its pre-war peak and was vastly dwarfed by other communist groups.

Whilst advocating revolution, Pankhurst herself lacked the capability to launch one. However, her

ability to maintain significant social networks and organize an endless variety of activities (among

which the publication of the Dreadnought) ensured her continuing political influence during this

period. Her influence, though disproportionate to her actual capability, prevented both other

communists and the government from simply ignoring her significance. This forced recognition

of Pankhurst by her detractors set her on a collision course that by 1920 culminated in a public

clash with Lenin at the height of communist unity negotiations and in her arrest for the publication

of seditious articles.

The Russian Revolutions and the Armistice revitalized the energies of British communists

following the Second International and the First World War. The Second International, created in

the late 19th century, was already strained by incessant debates between reformists and

revolutionaries. Its constituent delegations had vowed to repudiate all “capitalist and imperialist

wars,” but when war erupted in August 1914, they all too easily divided along Allied, Central, and

neutral lines. Further divisions fractured between patriotism and pacifism.68 The war’s end and the

68 Stephen Graubard, British Labour and the Russian Revolution 1917-1924 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956), p. 183.

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establishment of a communist state presented an opportunity for reorganization. Pankhurst lay at

the center of British efforts. After the First Congress of the Third International held in Moscow in

March 1919, a Russian messenger reached out to Pankhurst with the “recommendation from the

Third International [Comintern] that a Communist Party be inaugurated in this country.”69 Kendall

suggests that Pankhurst’s pre-war suffragette activities throughout Europe provided her with an

extensive contact network enabling her to be the first British leader to engage with Comintern.70

That same year, Pankhurst toured Europe’s radical hotspots, aided by her Italian anarchist lover,

Silvio Corio. She attended the conferences of the Italian Socialist Party in Bologna, the Comintern

Western Bureau in Frankfurt, and its “ultra-left” Sub-Bureau in Amsterdam.71 Additionally, she

served as the British correspondent to the Comintern journal.72

While Pankhurst’s personality and reputation enabled her to wield significant influence

during the immediate postwar period, she, along with her organization, became politically

outmaneuvered as unity negotiations launched. Of the three principal parties involved in the

negotiations, the WSF was the smallest. The leading power was the “right-wing communist”

British Socialist Party (BSP), led by Albert Inkpin and comprising 10,000 members by 1921.73 It

had also taken a pacifist position during the war and loosely collaborated with the ILP. After the

Russian Revolution, the BSP adopted orthodox Leninism, specifically pro-parliamentarianism and

the strategy of Labour Party affiliation. The Scottish-based Socialist Labour Party (SLP)

69 Pankhurst Papers in Walter Kendall, The Revolutionary Movement in Britain 1900-21 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1969), p. 238n20. 70 Kendall, Revolutionary Movement, p. 237. 71 Winslow, Sylvia Pankhurst, pp. 142-45. 72 Ibid., p. 136. 73 Kendall, Revolutionary Movement, p. 302. “Right-wing” and “left-wing” were used by communists to insult another’s diverging ideology and were not necessarily terms that one would use to self-identify. Nonetheless, they are useful as shorthand to describe the pro- vs. anti-parliamentarianism ideologies that defined the internecine disputes during this period.

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comprised a thousand members and committed itself to virulent anti-parliamentarianism,

eschewing trade unions and advocating a general strike. The WSF’s membership never reached

the ELFS’s prewar peak, constituting only a couple hundred members in the postwar period.74

The two significant obstacles to unity were the questions of parliamentarianism and Labour

Party affiliation. Pankhurst’s WSF and the SLP rejected both parliamentary tactics and a

relationship with Labour, questioning the ability of communists to maintain their revolutionary

integrity under such circumstances. Because the “right-wing” BSP was so much larger, the two

smaller groups feared unity with it would mean losing their “left-wing” voices. Negotiations began

faltering as political differences cascaded with personal interactions: Pankhurst started lobbing

attacks at BSP leader Inkpin, and he returned in kind through his organization’s newspaper. Then,

in April 1920, the BSP published a letter Pankhurst had anonymously written to Lenin in which

she disparaged every other radical organization, praised her own, and asked for Lenin’s thoughts

on parliamentarianism. The BSP promptly published Lenin’s reply, in which he patronizingly told

Pankhurst that parliamentarianism had been used to great effect in Russia and that revolutionaries

ought to collaborate despite significant differences.75

Though the groups were to meet in August of that year for further unity talks, Pankhurst

and the WSF decided to go it alone. With tiny affiliated groups, the WSF dissolved in June and

reconstituted itself as the “Communist Party (British Section of the Third International)” or

CP(BSTI). Outraged, the BSP and SLP wrote to Lenin complaining about Pankhurst’s actions. In

his response, he declared her actions to be wrong for having ignored the issue of unity and

announced that he would defend his support of parliamentarianism and Labour affiliation at the

74 Graubard, British Labour and the Russian Revolution, pp. 115-20. 75 Ibid., pp. 123-25.

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Comintern Second Congress in Moscow in July.76 The stage was set for a showdown between

Pankhurst and Lenin. Pankhurst smuggled herself to Russia and was escorted into the Kremlin to

sit at a table with Lenin, Bukharin, and John Reed to discuss the “British question.” Throughout

the conference, she engaged in a series of debates in which she argued against Lenin’s assumption

that Labour affiliation would provide communists with a political platform to expose the futility

of reformism.77 Ultimately, Lenin proved more persuasive. He sent delegates home with his

pamphlet “‘Left-Wing Communism’: An Infantile Disorder,” which criticized Pankhurst’s

ideology and derided it as “intellectual childishness, not the serious tactics of a revolutionary

class.”78 After a promising Unity Conference in August 1920, the BSP, SLP, and CP(BSTI)

scheduled a final meeting to take place in Leeds in January, 1921.79 Although Pankhurst committed

to resuming unity talks upon her return from Russia, it became clear she insisted upon maintaining

significant levels of “left-wing” independence.80 Her subsequent activities placed her in conflict

with the government as it dealt with critical challenges that flared up in 1920.

Though the 1918 Armistice had ended WWI’s large-scale combat, as far as the British

government was concerned, unrest and the prospect of rebellion seemed to only increase in the

early postwar period. The government shifted its focus from countering the threats posed by

German subversion and domestic pacifism towards military-industrial unrest and international

communism. The Russian Revolution in 1917 marked the rise of international socialism, as

revolutions spread across Germany and the collapsed Austro-Hungarian empire.81 The government

76 Ibid., pp. 127-28. 77 Winslow, Sylvia Pankhurst, pp. 156-57. 78 Graubard, British Labour and the Russian Revolution, pp. 133-34; V. I. Lenin, “Left-Wing Communism”: An Infantile Disorder, 8th ed. (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1981), p. 69. 79 Graubard, British Labour and the Russian Revolution, p. 137. 80 Winslow, Sylvia Pankhurst, p. 158. 81 Kendall, Revolutionary Movement, p. 189.

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thus feared similar insurrection in Britain, especially as industrial disputes had grown larger and

more class-conscious. Just months after the Armistice, in 1919, ten thousand soldiers mutinied in

Folkestone, Kent, accompanied by thousands of other soldiers demonstrating support elsewhere.

Likewise, the navy, deployed both abroad and domestically, “was at times scarcely more reliable

[than the Army].”82 The bubbling turmoil continued into 1920. The “Hands Off Russia”

movement, of which Pankhurst was a leader, had spent years agitating against British intervention

in Soviet Russia during its civil war and the Russo-Polish war. In May 1920, overall opposition to

British military intervention in Russia had risen to such a degree that London dockers refused to

load munitions onto ships bound for Poland in what became known as the Jolly George affair.83

The threats of military mutinies, labor unrest, and rebellion against Parliament were

amplified by the government’s fear of international communism. In February 1920, Head of the

Special Branch Sir Basil Thomson wrote to the Home Secretary in astonishment that “it is still not

illegal in England to advocate the abolition of Parliament and the setting up of Soviet Government,

to circulate Bolshevik literature, to accept money from abroad for revolutionary agitation, and to

be a secret representative of the Russian Soviet Government.”84 Though many in the Cabinet

feared communism, the Home Affairs Committee considered such type of legislation to lend itself

“to the possibility of great abuse, and would be regarded by many as an attack on the liberty of the

subject.”85 As with the pacifist movement, considered an existential threat during the war, the

government was unwilling to outright outlaw communism. Of course, the government still

countered it. Just as pacifist organizations existed during the war only at the government’s

82 Morgan, Conflict and Order, pp. 189-90. 83 Stephen White, “British Labour in Soviet Russia, 1920,” The English Historical Review 109, no. 432 (June 1994): p. 637, http://www.jstor.org/stable/572911. 84 PRO, CAB 24/97, Special Report No 14, 2 February 1920, in Ewing and Gearty, The Struggle for Civil Liberties, p. 101n39. 85 PRO, CAB 23/25, Cabinet Home Affairs Committee, 27 April 1921, in ibid., p. 102n45.

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discretion, likewise “so far as the Communist Party was concerned there was no freedom of

association, no freedom of assembly and no freedom of expression.”86 Though hesitant to strike

openly at ideology, the government used its emergency power to go after individuals.

With the cessation of hostilities against Germany in 1918, the 1914-15 Defence of the

Realm Acts might have been expected to expire. But wartime powers continued, unevenly, into

peacetime. A 1918 act extended the legal status of wartime until the last ratification of the various

WWI treaties on August 31st, 1921, but in February 1920, Parliament passed an another,

contradictory act, which specified that a majority of the DORA regulations would expire at the

end of August 1920.87 As the threat of a national coal strike loomed, the government began drafting

a new bill to circumvent DORA’s now ambiguous status and give itself full powers against a

“potentially revolutionary situation.”88 When the national strike did break out on October 16th,

1920, the day of the Dreadnought publication, the government immediately mobilized to introduce

the bill. It presented the Emergency Powers Bill on October 22nd and rushed it through

Parliament.89 Townshend considers the law to be a “substantial and irreversible redefinition of the

British state.” It allowed the government to establish states of emergency and issue regulations on

the vague basis of “public order.”90

Pankhurst’s actions with the Dreadnought during 1920 set her on a collision course with

the government. She and her organization had long been under surveillance since the pre-war

suffragette days. As industrial and military unrest reached boiling points in 1920, they fell into the

police’s crosshairs. The WSF and the Dreadnought had been particularly vocal about anti-

86 Ibid., p. 92, 105. 87 Ibid., p. 111. 88 Morgan, Conflict and Order, p. 98. 89 Ibid. 90 Townshend, Making the Peace, p. 88.

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interventionism, supporting the Jolly George affair in May. That month, two WSF affiliates were

arrested for inflammatory speeches, and the Dreadnought’s offices were raided seven times.91 In

spite of this, the organization kept up its work, and Pankhurst prepared for her trip to Moscow.

Upon her return, she resumed leadership of the Dreadnought, coordinating the

contributions of several individuals each posing a subversive threat to the British state. In late

1919, unwilling to hire a Black writer, Pankhurst’s friend and Labour politician George Lansbury

referred the young Jamaican author Claude McKay to Pankhurst. Appreciative of his work, she

asked McKay to write for the Dreadnought on race and labor in the London docks.92. Though the

WSF may have been “more piquant than important,” he noted that she “had a personality as

picturesque and passionate as any radical in London… she was always jabbing her hat pin into the

hides of the smug and slack labor leaders. Her weekly might have been called the Dread Wasp.”93

In 1920, McKay met a sailor named Dave Springhall. Springhall, evidently, was a

“constant reader” of the Dreadnought and came for copies to bring to the other men on his ship.94

In his memoir, McKay described him as “bold with youthful zeal and extremely incautious.”95

Springhall soon wrote to McKay with news from the navy about widespread discontent. When

Pankhurst returned from Russia, she eagerly edited it for front-page publication in the

Dreadnought. “The intelligence of the stuff was so extraordinary,” McKay claimed, “that she did

not want to risk having the youth's identity discovered by the authorities… she thought he could

91 Winslow, Sylvia Pankhurst, p. 123. 92 Ibid., p. 128. 93 Claude McKay, A Long Way from Home (New York: Furman, 1937), Black Thought and Culture, pp. 76-77. 94 Ibid., pp. 81-82. 95 Ibid., pp. 84.

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serve the social cause more excellently by remaining at his post.”96 They changed his name to

Hunter in the article to protect Springhall from implication.

During this period, a Bolshevik agent was working covertly with Pankhurst’s organization.

Born in Finland, Erkki Veltheim adopted the aliases of Andersen and Rubinstein. Kendall

describes him as “an unusually important agent.” The full extent of his role is still not known, but

it is clear that Comintern had tasked him with assisting British communists. Veltheim established

the underground line used by Pankhurst and other communists to reach Moscow for the summer

congress, and he also contributed fiscally and editorially to the Dreadnought.97

Thus, on Saturday October 16th, 1920, the Dreadnought published its weekly edition, in

which “Discontent on the Lower Deck” by S. 000 (Gunner) H. M. S. Hunter featured prominently

on the front page, accompanied by the articles “How to Get a Labour Government” by Rubinstein,

“The Yellow Peril and the Dockers” by Leon Lopez, and “The Datum Line” by Pankhurst.98 The

former suffragette published articles in her communist newspaper by a revolutionary sailor, a

Bolshevik agent, and a Jamaican writer that respectively exposed unrest within the navy, called

for the overthrow of Parliament, and advised dockers to transcend racial divisions and destroy

capitalism. Such ideas could not have coincided more simultaneously with the unrest that unfolded

across Britain that same day and week. Also on October 16th, the coal miners began a nationwide

strike, and on October 21st, railroad workers threatened the same.99 In the buildup to the miners’

strike, Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson had commented that “We have not nearly enough troops

96 Ibid., pp. 82. 97 Kendall, Revolutionary Movement, pp. 246-47. 98 While Pankhurst’s own short article, “The Datum Line,” is included among the seditious articles cited in her initial arrest, it does not feature very prominently in accounts of her 1920 proceedings and is completely absent from the 1921 appeal trial. The article is about 15 lines long and is comparatively less “seditious” than the other three. 99 Kendall, Revolutionary Movement, p. 194.

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here in England.”100 Then, the following Monday, October 18th, an unemployed workers’ march

in London broke out into a riot. A crowd had gathered along Downing Street to accompany a

deputation of London government officials to see the Prime Minister. Tensions between the crowd

and the police rose. As two more processions led by men carrying “red flags” forced their way

through the police line, fighting broke out.101 Crowd members began throwing stones at the police

and damaging property from Downing Street to Trafalgar Square, with more than 40 people injured

and £3,000 of property damaged.102

That same day, Scotland Yard raided the Dreadnought offices and confronted Pankhurst

over the whereabouts of Hunter’s (i.e., Springhall’s) letter on discontent within the navy. McKay,

recognizing the severity of Springhall’s transgression, hid the letter in his shoe and left unnoticed

by the police.103 The following day, October 19th, the London police arrested Pankhurst for sedition

as the Dreadnought’s editor. As Pankhurst defended herself during the initial proceedings, further

scandal erupted. On October 25th, Veltheim was arrested with his lover, Pankhurst’s secretary Miss

Gilbertson, while leaving the house of communist MP Colonel Malone.104 “Apparently,” McKay

wrote, “it was his pre-occupation with his love affair that enabled the detectives to trap Comrade

Vie.”105

Veltheim was tried under various provisions of the Aliens Order of 1920 for having failed

to register as a foreigner, having spent longer than the legal two months within the country, and

100 C. E. Caldwell, Field-Marshal Sir Henry Wilson, Vol. II, London 1924, p. 261 in Kendall, Revolutionary Movement, p. 194n34. 101 TNA, HO/144/1692/410769, “Metropolitan Police Report: Cannon Row Station ‘A’ Division,” October 18, 1920 (police report to Home Office). 102 TNA, HO/144/1692/410769, “Riot (Damages) Act 1886: Riot in Whitehall,” July 7, 1921 (letter from New Scotland Yard to Home Office). 103 McKay, A Long Way from Home, pp. 82-83. 104 Kendall, Revolutionary Movement, p. 246. 105 McKay, A Long Way from Home, p. 85.

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for refusing to answer police questions about his status. The judge assigned him the maximum

sentence limit of six months hard labor followed by deportation. But, reflective of the state’s

stumbling legal strategy during the interwar period, the Home Office and Parliamentary Counsel

grew worried about the case’s potential mistrial. The prosecutor wrote to Sir Basil Thomson of the

Special Branch to express his concerns that the court clerk failed to properly ask Veltheim if he

wanted a trial by judge or jury. Though the court attempted to later rectify its error, the prosecutor

wrote that he was “strongly inclined to the opinion” that the error “might as a matter of law

invalidate [some of Veltheim’s charges], were the matter taken to a higher Court.”106 Similarly,

Whitehall’s Office of Parliamentary Counsel and the Home Office exchanged messages debating

whether the onus of proving a foreigner’s length of residency rested on the prosecution or

defense.107 They also discussed whether to amend the Aliens Order, itself a hasty amendment to

what Townshend deems a “gaping breach in traditional notions of public crime” that continued

into the 1990s.108 Veltheim opted to defend himself and did not challenge the verdict.

His arrest sparked turmoil. His association with Malone prompted increased scrutiny

towards the MP, who was called to testify at Veltheim’s trial and was himself soon imprisoned for

sedition for suggesting to hang “a few Churchills or a few Curzons on lamp-posts.”109 Among

Veltheim’s seized possessions were letters from Pankhurst to Lenin, a CP(BSTI) budget, a “Red

Officers Corps” handbook, and payments for weapons and bombs.110 Sir Basil Thomson claimed

106 TNA, HO/144/22952, “Prosecution v. Erkki Veltheim […] Failing to comply with various provisions of the Aliens Order, 1920,” Nov. 4, 1920 (letter from prosecutor to Sir Basil Thomson of the Special Branch). 107 TNA, HO/144/22952, “Letter to Hugh Godley,” Jan. 4, 1921, and “Letter to Sir John Pedder,” Jan. 11, 1921 (letters to the Home Office and Office of the Parliamentary Counsel). 108 Townshend, Making the Peace, pp. 95-96. 109 TNA, HO/144/22952, “Prosecution v. Erkki Veltheim […] Failing to comply with various provisions of the Aliens Order, 1920,” Nov. 4, 1920 (letter from prosecutor to Sir Basil Thomson of the Special Branch); Christopher Andrew, Her Majesty’s Secret Service (New York: Viking, 1985), p. 271. 110 Kendall, Revolutionary Movement, p. 247.

31

that they “threw considerable light on the British communist movement,” and one of his inspectors

declared it “the most damnable stuff I have ever seen during my whole career.”111 Secretary of the

CP(BSTI), Edgar Whitehead, accused Pankhurst of being a police plant, although most others such

as BSP member John Maclean believed Pankhurst’s innocence.112 The double agent was in fact

Russian-American communist Jacob Nosivitsky, captured and recruited by Thomson in 1919.113

Like Pankhurst, McKay was accused of being a spy, which scared him into ending his London

sojourn early.114 During these flashpoints, Springhall returned to London and attempted to see

Pankhurst, but McKay urged him to lie low on his ship: “he must have acted indiscreetly and

created suspicion against himself, for when his ship arrived at its next port, he was summarily

dismissed.”115 At Pankhurst’s initial proceedings in November 1920, alderman Sir Alfred Newton

assigned her a six-month sentence to the second division of Holloway, though in his view “quite

inadequate.”116 She appealed, and the next trial was scheduled for January 5th, 1921.

On the eve of her appeal, Pankhurst prepared to defend herself as the publisher of McKay,

Springhall, and Veltheim’s articles, accused to be “calculated or likely to cause sedition and

disaffection.”117 Pankhurst had attempted to hide evidence of Springhall’s implication at the time

of her arrest, and asked “Are there any more to come into this?”118 In the resulting weeks, there

was more to come to it. Police arrested Veltheim, who was imprisoned and deported. The ensuing

chaos falsely implicated Pankhurst as a police plant and scared McKay away from England.

111 “A Survey of Revolutionary Movements in Great Britain in the Year 1920,” Jan. 1921, PRO CAB 24/118, in Andrew, Her Majesty’s Secret Service, p. 271n35. 112 McKay, A Long Way from Home, p. 86; Winslow, Sylvia Pankhurst, pp. 130-31. 113 Kendall, Revolutionary Movement, pp. 247-48. 114 McKay, A Long Way from Home, pp. 86-87. 115 Ibid., p. 84. 116 TNA, HO/144/1697/414256, The Daily Herald, Oc. 29, 1920 (clipping). 117 London Metropolitan Archives, CLA/047/LJ/03/713, “Conviction. (Imprisonment) in the City of London,” Oct. 1920 (conviction charge). 118 Pankhurst Papers, reel 254, “Appeal of Miss Sylvia Pankhurst,” Oct. 1920 (trial transcript), p. 11.

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Springhall soon saw himself dismissed from the navy. Sir Basil Thomson’s Special Branch, which

had previously mocked Lenin’s purported instruction to Pankhurst to unite the communists as

being the worst possible choice of person, now delighted in the dampened “ardour of the agitators

who seemed to have a strong aversion to prison.”119 On bail, Pankhurst agreed to step down from

her Dreadnought role and to not attend political meetings. Another Unity Convention met at the

end of December with a final meeting scheduled in January. While Lenin wrote a glowing article

in Pravda expressing solidarity with Pankhurst during her arrest and commending her for

representing “the interests of hundreds upon millions of people who are oppressed by the British

and other capitalists,” he would have equally appreciated her absence during these gatherings.120

Up to this point, her communist detractors as well as the government had been forced to

acknowledge Pankhurst’s influence. In unity negotiations Pankhurst willfully led the tiny anti-

parliamentary minority. And though she lacked the means to launch any uprising, her role as

publisher directly tapped into national threats. The sedition episode thus reflected not only the

paradoxical position she occupied, but it also provided an opportunity for both the government and

her rivals to rid themselves of her: by respectively locking her up and unifying in her absence.

Increasingly isolated and facing health conditions along with financial difficulty, Pankhurst used

the appeal trial to both defend herself on a personal level and to project her values on the public

platform of the courtroom.

119 CAB 24/112 CP 1908 PRO, in Romero, Portrait of a Radical, p. 146n30; “A Survey of Revolutionary Movements in Great Britain in the Year 1920,” Jan. 1921, PRO CAB 24/119, in Andrew, Her Majesty’s Secret Service, p. 271n35. 120 V. I. Lenin, “Letter to the British Workers,” in On Britain, trans. T. Dexter and I. Lasker (Moscow: Foreign Language Publications, 1941), p. 495.

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Appealing Sedition: Performativity of Communism and Suffrage

The appeal trial operated as an antagonistic confrontation between Pankhurst and the

government. The prosecutor portrayed Pankhurst as a dangerous agitator during a precarious time

for the country. In her defense, Pankhurst depicted the government as the heartless oppressor of

civil liberties. She appealed the sentence on three bases: that a second-division sentence would

damage her health, that the isolated excerpts were not seditious when considered part of the entire

publication, and that the Dreadnought fell within a tradition of radicalism, including communism,

which had been permitted within the country. While Pankhurst wove together suffrage, workin-

class aid, pacifism, and communism throughout the trial, her appeal belies the tensions between

relatively convincing claims towards her individual history (of suffrage and ELFS/WSF activity)

and the rather clunky evocation of adherence to “scientific principles” of communism.

On January 5th, 1921, the Guildhall in the City of London heard Sylvia Pankhurst’s public

appeal of her sedition conviction. The aldermen, comprised of gentlemen and businessmen,

presided over the case in which Mr. Travers Humphreys served as senior counsel to the crown and

Pankhurst represented herself. Humphreys restated Pankhurst’s conviction under Regulation 42 of

the Defence of the Realm Regulations, according to which: “If any person does any act calculated

or likely to cause sedition or disaffection among any of His Majesty’s forces, or among the civilian

population, he shall be guilty of an offence against the Regulations.”121 Laying out the seditious

content of the prosecuted Dreadnought articles, Humphreys claimed that “if the Court comes to

the conclusion that these articles are reasonably correctly described in the conviction, I venture to

submit that the Court will not have much reason to doubt as to whether those articles do not come

within the—if indeed they do not go far beyond the language of Regulation 42.”122

121 Pankhurst Papers, reel 254, “Appeal of Miss Sylvia Pankhurst,” Oct. 1920 (trial transcript), p. 1. 122 Ibid., 2.

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Two other DORA Regulation 42 conviction cases serve to further contextualize

Pankhurst’s, as they also involved legally ambiguous sedition charges of communists. On February

2nd, 1916, officials arrested revolutionaries John MacLean, William Gallacher, and John Muir of

the Clyde Workers’ Committee, along with their printer Walter Bell, for publishing the article

“Should the Workers Arm?”123 All four were charged under Regulation 42 for the article’s

advocacy of impeding ammunition production, although their counsel claimed that the article

“meant exactly the opposite of the meaning extracted from it by the Crown… It was intended to

prevent strikes and discourage violence.”124 All four were found guilty.

Months after Pankhurst’s 1921 appeal, the General Secretary of the unified Communist

Party of Great Britain, Albert Inkpin, was arrested for seditious publications under both the

Emergency Regulations of 1921 and under Regulation 42 of the Defence of the Realm Act. For

Inkpin’s defense, his counsel pointed to the inconsistency between the Termination of the Present

War (Definition) Act of 1918 indirectly extending DORA until the war’s end in August 1921, and

the War Emergency Laws (Continuance) Act of 1920 which directly extended DORA only until

August 1920. Drawing upon what historians Ewing and Gerty describe as “surely torturing

language and logic,” the Lord Chief Justice presiding over the case explained how the two acts

were not only compatible, but in fact “stand together.”125 The two historians contend that Inkpin’s

case “represented a cynical use of statutory powers for a purpose for which they can scarcely have

been intended.”126

Although Pankhurst’s sedition case was not as severely prosecuted by the British

government and did not reach higher levels within the court system, her conviction consisted of a

123 Ewing and Gearty, The Struggle for Civil Liberties, p. 75. 124 Ibid., p. 78. 125 Ibid., p. 111. 126 Ibid.

35

similarly circumstantial situation. Increasingly evident throughout the prosecution’s

argumentation, the government desired to bring charges specifically against the authors of the three

articles, but logistically could only reach Pankhurst. However, they did so on the basis of her role

as publisher, and not from aiding and abetting the three authors. In this respect, Mr. Humphreys

installed his argumentation within the “torturing language and logic” of the courts system.

Analysis of his prosecution illustrates the specific ways in which the interwar governmental

ideological fear and procedural uncertainty targeted individual civil liberties.

After introducing her charge, Humphreys further qualified the sedition charge on the

grounds that the three articles in question “advocated disloyalty and refusal to obey orders in His

Majesty’s Navy, destruction of Parliament by force and the looting of the docks of London.”127

Though proposing to just read selected extracts, he suggested that:

The Court will… for itself if it desires, read the whole of the newspaper; and particularly if there is any part which would seem to lead one to any opposite conclusion to that which I invited the Court to draw. So far as I am aware, having glanced through the paper, there is nothing from beginning to end in it which detracts from the nature of the statements… in the three articles...128

To prove that the three articles violated Regulation 42, Humphreys purposefully decontextualized

the extracts. And while nominally entertaining the possibility that the court could arrive at an

“opposite conclusion” in reading the entirety of the newspaper, he admitted to only having

“glanced through” it himself.

Humphreys then proceeded to read aloud each selected excerpt to explain their seditious

aspects. First discussing “Discontent on the Lower Deck” by S. 000 (Gunner) H. M. S. Hunter

(aka Dave Springhall), Humphreys declared, “My submission to the Court is that to ask men in the

Navy to hail the formation of a Red Navy… the whole object of it is not to obey the orders of the

127 Pankhurst Papers, reel 254, “Appeal of Miss Sylvia Pankhurst,” Oct. 1920 (trial transcript), p. 2. 128 Ibid., p. 3.

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Government… is calculated to cause disaffection amongst the Navy.”129 He then quoted from

“How to Get a Labour Government” by H. Rubinstein (aka Erkki Veltheim), who had written,

“How are we going to destroy Parliament? Firstly, by destroying the faith which millions of British

workers still have in it…[and] to disperse Parliament by force it is necessary to organise and

prepare, also outside Parliament for the armed mass-revolt and the general strike.”130 Humphreys

additionally read from Claude McKay’s “The Yellow Peril and the Dockers.” Rather than “being

unduly concerned about the presence of their coloured fellow men, who, like themselves are

victims of Capitalism,” the article advised, white dockers should instead “turn their attention to

the huge stores of wealth along the water front… the jobless should lead the attack on the bastilles,

the bonded warehouses along the docks to solve the question of unemployment.”131 The content

of the extracts Humphreys cited, navy mutinies, destruction of the British government, and dock

worker strikes, reflected the very threats plaguing the British government in the interwar period

up to the moment of the issue’s publication.

Pankhurst presented her appeal against the sedition charge on three different bases to build

upon her past before and during the war. She argued against the prison sentence and second

division assignment on the basis of her health. In doing so, Pankhurst drew upon her past in the

suffrage movement both directly and indirectly. She introduced her doctor, Ettie Sayer, to testify

that six months in the second division would severely impact her health. Sayer affirmed that

Pankhurst suffered from chronic internal inflammation received from her suffragette hunger

strikes.132 Sayer made her recommendation under the knowledge that a transfer to the first division

would allow the continued treatment necessary for recovery, while in the second division “she

129 Ibid., p. 4. 130 Ibid., p. 5. 131 Ibid., p. 8. 132 Ibid., pp. 13-14.

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would be subject to hardships.” Pankhurst began to ask about specific hardships brought on by the

second division diet, but the prosecution and the court recorder interrupted, “We have no evidence

of the diet. If your condition is such as to require special diet, it is dealt with by the prison doctor

in the usual way.” “I must beg to state,” Pankhurst replied, “after long experience of Holloway,

that is incorrect.”133

Her long experience of Holloway had been one of trauma. In March 1913, Pankhurst wrote

an article entitled “My Torture,” which provided a graphic account of the forced feeding she

endured while hunger-striking. After Pankhurst had hunger struck for several days in prison, six

female officers entered her cell and pinned her on the bed. Doctors entered and pulled her head

back. She described, “I felt a steel instrument being forced against my gums, where I had had two

teeth out. I fought against it with all my strength, but, cutting its way into the flesh it worked its

way in.” The doctors force fed her multiple times over an extended period, and Pankhurst wrote

that “Somedays I felt the tube go all the way down into the stomach… Once or twice I think I

screamed terribly after it was over, in an uncontrollable sort of way.” As the force feeding

continued, Pankhurst frequently vomited up the food, and her eyes began to look like “cups of

blood.”134 In addition to this debilitating episode, Pankhurst hunger struck seven more times in the

following two-year period. Thus in 1921, Sayer referenced the consequences of hunger-striking

and forced feeding in her cogent medical recommendation to dispute Pankhurst’s second division

assignment.

Because Pankhurst invoked her suffragette history on the basis of her health, she implicitly

brought up her earlier conflicts with authority and her defense of civil liberties. On January 27th,

1914, Pankhurst had written a letter to the editor in Votes for Women on the issue of an East London

133 Ibid. 134 TNA, HO/144/1558/234191, The Daily Herald, Mar. 26, 1913 (clipping).

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council banning suffragettes from using its town hall. In it, she claimed that “I was imprisoned

under the provisions of an old statute of Edward III because the Government did not like the tone

of my speeches.”135 Here, just as in the 1921 appeal, Pankhurst framed government prosecution as

a personal attack against her right to free speech. And the same way she questioned DORA’s usage

against her in 1921, she ridiculed in 1914 the application of centuries-old legislation. “What is the

right of free speech? Is it the right to say what other people and especially people in power approve

of?” Pankhurst had questioned. “No, else there had been no reason for our ancestors to fight and

suffer and even die for it. No, free speech is the right to say what one believes, however much

one’s belief may be condemned.”136 Pankhurst rooted her defense of free speech in a support of

radicalism and condemnation of unequal power structures.

Assertion of civil liberties in fact lay at the core of Pankhurst’s defense as she argued

against her sedition accusation. Having examined Dr. Sayer, Pankhurst next addressed

Humphreys’s decontextualized Dreadnought excerpts. She first considered the paragraph he had

cited from McKay’s “Yellow Peril and the Dockers” in which dockers were advised to “turn their

attention to the huge stores of wealth along the water front… The jobless should lead the attack on

the bastilles, the bonded warehouses along the docks to solve the question of unemployment.”137

She told the court that she had not interpreted it how the prosecution did. If it actually meant a

direct call to an uprising, “I should not have put it in because it is contrary to my policy, and to

how I think things should be done.”138 In fact, it was against her views “to say that unemployment

could be cured by looting. What the article means to me is that the workers should have control of

135 Pankhurst Papers, reel 230, “Letter to the Editor,” Jan. 27, 1914, (from Sylvia Pankhurst). 136 Ibid. 137 Pankhurst Papers, reel 254, “Appeal of Miss Sylvia Pankhurst,” Oct. 1920 (trial transcript), p. 6. 138 Ibid., p. 15.

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the means of production.”139 Thus, she argued that these passages served only as political

metaphors. She tried to soften the controversial language by invoking her knowledge of the area.

“The article by Lopez [McKay] was interesting to me,” Pankhurst explained, “because I know a

good deal about the conditions in the East End. I have lived there since 1912, and had a great deal

to do with coping with poverty and unemployment, and various evils down there.”140

Pankhurst attempted to read other articles from the Dreadnought, including one that she

had written herself. The chairman interrupted her, “This is another article; it cannot be the context

of the paragraph.” She responded, “the context is the entire paper. I am responsible for the entire

paper.”141 Humphreys prosecuted her as editor for the seditious content of three excerpted passages

written by other authors within the newspaper. But by admitting both that he had only “glanced”

at the rest of it and that the rest could contradict his argument, Humphreys laid the foundation for

Pankhurst’s appeal before she began. Given her accused and accepted responsibility for the

articles, she sustained, all of it must be taken into consideration as a “whole article,” and sedition

could not therefore be brought upon the basis of isolated paragraphs.

Pankhurst likewise claimed that because comparably extreme works had been and were

published in the country, she had the right to publish such material as well. She envisaged herself

within a history of English radicalism that had otherwise been tolerated by the government. After

discussing the Lopez (McKay) article on the dockers, Pankhurst reminded the court that none of

the article’s concepts were new. “My father brought me up from my early childhood as a

communist,” she said. “These ideas are current, legal and circulated in this country… We have

News from Nowhere, a book anyone can buy and read, given to me by my father when I was a little

139 Ibid., p. 16. 140 Ibid. 141 Ibid., p. 17.

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girl.”142 William Morris, poet, designer, and founder of the Arts and Crafts movement, wrote the

utopian socialist novel News From Nowhere in 1893. Morris had entered the social circles of the

artistic Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and emerging 19th century socialist groups. Throughout his art

designs, poetry, and philosophical tracts, Morris rejected the exploitations of industrialism and

modernity and praised communal agrarian and folk-based elements. News From Nowhere presents

a contemporary man who wakes up from slumber to find a bucolic England of the future. 143 In the

excerpt from which Pankhurst read, he asks a member of that society why Parliament has been

turned into a manure storehouse. The man responds that “the whole people is our Parliament.”

Their society has no need of a system where “if the people made any attempt to deal with the cause

of their grievances, the law stepped in and said, this is sedition, revolt or what not, and slew or

tortured the ringleaders of such attempts.”144

The chairman interrupted Pankhurst to ask what she was reading from and why. “It is not

a seditious book,” she responded, “neither is this paper.”145 In presenting a novelized utopia,

Morris was not seditious in the way the prosecution contended that the Dreadnought articles

advocated violent overthrow of the Navy and Parliament. Instead, Pankhurst’s reading of Morris

reflects the way in which she considered the sedition charge and her newspaper through her

fundamental political strain of culturally-centered utopian romanticism (initially developed in part

by Morris’s works). Unlike the government and its concern of communist subversion in the wake

of the Jolly George affair or the October miners’ strike, she considered her newspaper’s articles as

part of a political-literary tradition as non-seditious as Morris’s novel.

142 Ibid. 143 Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, s. v. “Morris, William (1834–1896),” accessed Feb. 20, 2018, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/19322. 144 Pankhurst Papers, reel 254, “Appeal of Miss Sylvia Pankhurst,” Oct. 1920 (trial transcript), p. 19. 145 Ibid., p. 20.

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Pankhurst installed herself within a more violently radical line by citing John Richard

Green’s A Short History of the English People, “another standard work given to me when a child

at school.”146 Green, an Anglican deacon and settlement house leader, wrote his work in 1874 as

a departure from conventional and conservative political accounts.147 His book treated the social

and cultural history of the English people who rose up against oppressive power structures. Citing

once instance, she described:

[The book] applauds Cromwell first of all for having organised Pride’s Purge — in which 150 members of Parliament were arrested quite illegally by the Army — and, secondly, for dissolving Parliament. Because Parliament was doing wrong it was thought right for the Army to revolt. We think Parliament is not doing right today… We are allowed to express our opinions — because such opinions are expressed in standard works…148

With this excerpt, Pankhurst connected her opinion, the overthrow of Parliament, to a recognizably

violent and controversial figure, Cromwell. More specifically, she claimed that to express her

opinions was comparable to Green’s praise of Cromwell’s seditious actions. Pankhurst argued for

the right to express these opinions that are “analyzing scientific causes and scientific results.”149

Pankhurst also identified herself as part of a larger communist community. As the aldermen

became increasingly annoyed with Pankhurst’s long reading of extracts, she clarified that she was

“working on scientific communist principles, and not on indiscriminate looting.”150 Furthermore,

she argued that seminal communist texts were far more violent than any Dreadnought article and

yet considered suitable for publication. She cited Marx and Engels’s Communist Party Manifesto

as one such example, reading aloud that “the bourgeoisie has not only forged the weapons that

bring death to itself; it has also produced the men who will wield these weapons – the modern

146 Ibid., p. 21. 147 Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, s. v. “Green, John Richard (1837–1883),” accessed Feb. 20, 2018, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/11391. 148 Pankhurst Papers, reel 254, “Appeal of Miss Sylvia Pankhurst,” Oct. 1920 (trial transcript), p. 21. 149 Ibid. 150 Ibid., p. 25.

42

workers the Proletarians…” The chairman quickly interrupted, “all we are concerned with is the

actual publications you have issued; the question is whether they infringe this Regulation.”151

Pankhurst concluded her appeal as a martyr of civil liberties and communism, galvanizing

past and present threads of her life into the “old Pankhurst fireworks” described by Winslow.152 “I

am afraid that if you send me to prison for six months,” Pankhurst challenged, “as soon as I get

out I shall return to advocating the abolition of the capitalist system and its class rule…”153 This

defiance resounded throughout the rest of her closing remarks as she declared, “You will never

crush it out of me, or kill it, and I am only one out of thousands or millions.”154 Pankhurst

proclaimed the impenetrability of her anti-capitalism and her identity within a larger communist

movement including revolutions in Russia, Germany, and Hungary.

She similarly offered herself up as a guardian of free speech. “I think it most unfair,” she

explained, “that the prosecution could not find anything I had written; but took it from the writings

of other people. I prefer to suffer to letting others suffer – as you have seen in [my] destroying

[Springhall’s] letter.”155 Now, as at the moment of her arrest, she expressed her responsibility for

the Dreadnought through a vocabulary of suffering. In doing so, she adopted the role of martyr

derived from the suffrage movement. Indeed, she once again linked her suffragette hunger-striking

to the sedition case by referring to the six-month imprisonment as a potential “death sentence.”156

Dramatically drawing upon her East London engagement with the working class to explain

the development of her radicalism, she told the court:

My convictions have been bitten into me hard and deep by experience in the working class. When the war broke out you took the men, and… the Government was not able to provide

151 Ibid., p. 22. 152 Winslow, Sylvia Pankhurst, p. 131. 153 Pankhurst Papers, reel 254, “Appeal of Miss Sylvia Pankhurst,” Oct. 1920 (trial transcript), p. 29. 154 Ibid., p. 33. 155 Ibid., p. 30. 156 Ibid., p. 32.

43

for the women. Because I had been a suffragette and had fought for the cause of woman, the women came to me and asked me to help them. I had dying babies brought to me.157

Her experience as a suffragette had developed into her working-class assistance and pacifism.

Pankhurst highlighted the wartime suffering in the East End she had witnessed and attempted to

alleviate. Drawing the past into the present, she concluded her appeal: “I have been in prison; most

of the people are there by poverty or drink… Girls are in prison because they tried to commit

suicide, because the world was too hard for them. You may put me in prison but you cannot stop

the cause, it is stronger than I.”158

Members of the public broke out in applause. An unidentified woman in the back rose up

to shout, “You and your wretched system are upheld by force!” The chairman told her to remain

quiet or leave, and she responded, “I have made my protest, I will go. You are upheld by force.”

The trial transcript records further “applause and other protests from the back of the court.”159 The

Times presented an alternative account (enthusiastically picked up in Romero’s biography) that

Pankhurst became “almost hysterical and incoherent… She waved her arms and thumped her

papers, and as she went on at a great rate her hair became loosened and fell over her ears and

forehead, giving her an almost haggard appearance.”160 Having spent the course of the trial

interrupting Pankhurst while she argued her defense, the aldermen certainly seemed to take a

perspective similar to that of The Times. They immediately entered consultation and returned to

announce that Pankhurst’s appeal had been unanimously rejected with Pankhurst to bear the

session costs.161 The united ease with which the aldermen reaffirmed Pankhurst’s conviction

demonstrates the scope of the powers afforded by the emergency wartime legislation to the

157 Ibid., p. 32. 158 Ibid., p. 34. 159 Ibid., p. 34. 160 TNA, HO/144/1697/414256, The Times, Jan. 6, 1921 (clipping). 161 Pankhurst Papers, reel 254, “Appeal of Miss Sylvia Pankhurst,” Oct. 1920 (trial transcript), p. 35.

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executive and judicial branches. That the prosecutor specifically isolated paragraphs from the

paper, admitted to not even having read the whole edition, and invited the aldermen at their volition

to consider the complete publication, and that the defendant precisely attempted to do so, did not

preclude the aldermen from immediately validating the government’s position.

The imprisonment and fines came at a particularly inopportune moment for Pankhurst. The

various communist parties had already set January 29th, 1921, to be the date of the final Unity

Convention. Without Pankhurst there, anti-parliamentarianism lost its most vehement advocate.

She also faced challenges within her own organization, the CP(BSTI). Her lover, Silvio Corio, had

begun to help with the Dreadnought. But due to both Corio’s politics (anarchism) and personal

behavior (accusations of drunkenness), National Secretary of the CP(BSTI), Edgar Whitehead,

asked Pankhurst to remove the Dreadnought’s affiliation from the organization.162 Additionally,

the Dreadnought reached critical levels of debt in January, and Pankhurst’s prison fines only added

to her financial challenges.163 Pankhurst was defending her communism in court as colleagues

effectively ignored or challenged her.

Fundamentally, this appeal, her last such trial, reveals the tensions between Pankhurst’s

communist present and her suffragette and home front past. In the middle of her appeal, she cited

Marx and Engels and made frequent reference to her adherence to “scientific principles” and

“doctrines.” But she cited Morris and Green far more comprehensively, and she did not elaborate

beyond the generalized abstraction of communism as “scientific principle” and not “indiscriminate

looting.” Rather, it was her usage of the “Pankhurst family fireworks” that proved more

compelling. She began her appeal by introducing her doctor as a witness to raise concern of her

fragile health condition that directly resulted from Pankhurst’s suffragette past (i.e., prior

162 Winslow, Sylvia Pankhurst, pp. 167-68. 163 Kendall, Revolutionary Movement, p. 266; Winslow, Sylvia Pankhurst, p. 168.

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government treatment of her). Invoking the suffrage movement provided her the thematic and

celebrity basis for the rest of her appeal, including assertion of her continuity within the history of

English radicalism and her impassioned conclusion as a revenant martyr, that communist

allegiance could not. But though Pankhurst’s appeal set a dramatic tone provoking audience

reaction, it did not sway the judges’ opinions, nor did it make a lasting mark in the way her suffrage

activities had. In prison as well as upon release, Pankhurst escalated her usage of these tactics, but

they were similarly limited.

46

Prison and Release: Attempted Constructions of Martyrology

Once in prison, Pankhurst, along with outside supporters, petitioned for various privileges

on the basis of her status as political prisoner and her history as a suffragette. Upon her release,

Pankhurst’s reentry into society captured some media attention as well as her own publication, the

Dreadnought. She used the spectacle of her release to cultivate her political celebrity. Drawing on

her difficult experience during imprisonment, Pankhurst projected differing personas: on the one

hand, a frail woman victimized by an oppressive government, and on the other, a transcendent

heroine illuminating truth. These self-representations evoked the religious and sentimental rhetoric

of the suffragettes, but under completely different circumstances. The government outright

rejected her appeal and petition, she did not achieve significant or lasting media prominence, and

fellow communists united in her absence and ultimately expelled her four months after her release.

Thus, this sedition episode is emblematic of the way in which Pankhurst failed to transplant her

utopian romanticism, effective in the suffrage movement, into an unreceptive postwar context.

At Pankhurst’s January 5th appeal, the London Guildhall aldermen unanimously upheld her

six-month prison sentence in the second division of Holloway. Sir Leon Radzinowicz and Roger

Hood in “The Status of Political Prisoner in England” explain the development of British prison

divisions within the context of Victorian reformism. At the height of the Chartist movement in the

1840s, the government found itself pressed to explain the widely divergent prison treatment of the

Chartists, working-class constitutional reformers arrested for “political offences” like sedition and

libel. More delicately, the government aimed to sidestep the Chartists’ own demands to be treated

categorically as “political prisoners” distinct from criminals. The government therefore passed the

Prisons Bill of 1840 to circumvent direct acknowledgement of political prisoner rights by dividing

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convicted criminals into three divisions.164 A first division prisoner, as Radzinowicz and Hood

write, was “for all intents, treated like an unconvicted prisoner awaiting trial.” The first division

afforded substantial privileges and liberties over the second division, including no work

requirement, the ability to choose clothing, rent furniture, and even hire another prisoner. The

second and third divisions did not substantially differ overall, except for hard labor in the latter.165

The bill placed the responsibility to assign prisoners to one or another division with the presiding

judge.166

As mentioned, Pankhurst’s appeal was not only against the prison sentence itself, but also

against her specific assignment to the second division. Consequently, in prison Pankhurst

petitioned for first division privileges, asking for Rule 243a to be applied to her. In 1910, Home

Secretary Winston Churchill devised Rule 243a to address the public image crisis the government

faced during the women’s suffrage movement. In 1905, the militancy of the WSPU had led to the

widespread imprisonment of its member activists, charged with disorderly conduct, destruction of

property, and harassing police officers.167 Local jurisdictions frequently assigned suffragettes to

the second and third divisions as the Home Office denied that English Law recognized “political

motive as giving rise to any claim to special treatment.”168 Public pressure exerted on the Home

Office forced its leadership to begrudgingly accommodate the “highly strung” and “neurotic”

temperament of the suffragettes with privileges based on medical grounds.169 As the militancy

164 Leon Radzinowicz and Roger Hood, “The Status of Political Prisoner in England: The Struggle for Recognition,” Virginia Law Review 65, no. 8 (1979): pp. 1432-33, doi:10.2307/1072581. 165 Ibid., p. 1459 166 Ibid., p. 1433. 167 Ibid., p. 1457-8. 168 The Imprisonment of Suffragists, 196 Parliamentary Debates (4th ser.) 1040 (1908) in ibid., p. 1463n190. 169 The National Archives (London), HO/144/882/167074/35, “Prison Treatment of Suffragettes,” 1908, in ibid., p. 1465n193.

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campaign further escalated, an increasing number of imprisoned suffragettes began hunger-

striking in 1908, in part to protest being denied political prisoner status. The government’s

response, forcible feeding, drew widespread outrage for its oppressive and invasive nature,

especially because most suffragettes were wives and daughters in prominent middle and upper-

class families. Permanent Under-secretary Edward Troup (holding his position from 1908 to 1922)

represented the bureaucratic perspective of the Home Office, complaining that “If these ladies are

treated as First Division prisoners, there will be no end to the procession of candidates for easy

martyrdom and then imprisonment will become meaningless.”170 Divided between the competing

desires to discourage a too-comfortable prison environment for “easy martyrdom” and to salvage

the government’s tarnished reputation, Churchill instituted Rule 243a in 1910 to give the discretion

over treatment to the prison commissioners.171 If granted (applicable according to Home Office

policy by 1921 to suffragettes, conscientious objectors, and DORA offenders), the prisoner could

wear her own clothing, receive reading and writing materials, and procure better food options

among other privileges.172

Pankhurst’s petition for the benefits of Rule 243a in 1921 drew upon her personal

involvement in this history. At the end of the request, she wrote that the government beginning in

1910 had granted privileges to those “charged with offences committed from political and

conscientious motives,” including Pankhurst herself for suffragette militancy in 1913-1914.173 As

she stated: “I am one of those who took part in the struggle to obtain Rule 243a and I do not feel

justified in relinquishing that just amelioration which was won after much hardship and many

170 TNA, HO/45/10389/170808/19, “CRIMINAL: Suffragettes treatment in prison following convictions in connection with the “rush” on the House of Commons,” 1908, in ibid., p. 1466n200. 171 Ibid., p. 1472. 172 TNA, HO/144/1697/414256, “Privileges allowed under Rule 243a,” Jan. 1, 1921 (memo from Prison Commission, Home Office). 173 TNA, HO/144/1697/414256, “Petition,” Jan. 13, 1921 (Sylvia Pankhurst to Home Secretary).

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hunger strikes had been endured. I therefore again ask for its application in my case.”174 In that

earlier period, Pankhurst had hunger struck eight times and was forcibly fed in prison for several

extended durations.175 Just as she had done during the appeal trial and would do upon release from

prison, in this petition Pankhurst mobilized her suffragette credentials.

Pankhurst also argued for the provision of food, clothing, and writing materials. She

stressed the importance of having food sent by her friends because of her colitis and inflammatory

condition, confirmed during her trial examination of Dr. Sayer to have developed out of her

suffragette hunger-striking and force feeding.176 This medical argument thereby served as an

additional and tangible reference to her suffragette legacy, both during the trial and now in prison.

Pankhurst also referenced her health as one of the two bases for her right to wear her own clothes,

claiming to be ill from the cold temperatures of her second division cell.

Pankhurst’s petition progressed from medical grounds to ideological claims. “Moreover,”

she specified, “since in my opinion I have not committed a crime but have done as my principles

and conscience dictated, I object to wearing prison clothes and to submitting to the number of other

indignities from which Rule 243a exempts those to whom it is applied.” 177 This distinction

between criminal and political offense had been claimed by the Chartists, Irish Fenians,

suffragettes and conscientious objectors, along with their parliamentary supporters.178 Pankhurst

installed herself within this history of political dissenters. She went further, arguing:

For a person of active mental life, it is no small thing to be deprived for six months of writing materials… I would point out that it is unusual throughout the world to deprive political prisoners of material for writing and study and that many of the finest books have been written in prison by political prisoners of various nationalities.179

174 Ibid. 175 See page 14, note 35. 176 TNA, HO/144/1697/414256, “Petition,” Jan. 13, 1921 (Sylvia Pankhurst to Home Secretary). 177 Ibid. 178 Radzinowicz and Hood, “Political Prisoner in England.” 179 TNA, HO/144/1697/414256, “Petition,” Jan. 13, 1921 (Sylvia Pankhurst to Home Secretary).

50

By reminding the Home Secretary that various eminent political prisoners produced substantial

writings throughout history, Pankhurst suggested that, given the opportunity, she could too. Such

an implication marks a shift in which Pankhurst focused principally on herself: her health

conditions, her own history as a suffragette, her personal conscience, and her status as a person

with an “active mental life.”

The prison and government officials were unsympathetic to her claims. Accompanying her

petition sent to the Home Office were a letter from the medical officer and the prison

commissioners’ meeting notes. Responding to Pankhurst’s claims of suffering from inflammation

and the cold temperature of the cell, the medical officer wrote that her cell was kept at 60 degrees

and that she was being treated with her doctor’s prescription. He concluded that “her general health

appears quite satisfactory at the present time.”180 The commissioners were significantly more

antagonistic towards her request. Dismissing her adherence to “principles and conscience,” one

argued that “Sedition-mongers and other persons who attempt to cause disaffection in the Navy

have no claim in these critical times to specifically favourable treatment in prison.”181 Another

described her as a “hysterical woman in feeble health”.182 While one did consider granting

Pankhurst some of the privileges, they found no need to accommodate her request and advised the

Home Office to reject it. The Home Office promptly followed suit and declared that she would

only have “such food, clothing, etc. as the Medical Officer may consider necessary.”183

180 TNA, HO/144/1697/414256, “Memorandum: 9587. Sylvia Pankhurst,” Jan. 13, 1921 (Pankhurst’s medical officer and Holloway governor to HO). 181 TNA, HO/144/1697/414256, “Prisoner Commissioners Forward for instructions of S. of S. report from Governor of Holloway Prison,” Jan. 10, 1921 (minutes). 182 Ibid. 183 TNA, HO/144/1697/414256, “Petition response,” Jan. 24, 1921 (Under-Secretary of State to Governor of Hollow Prison).

51

In response, Clara Gilbert Cole, a WSF member whose husband served as the Dreadnought

illustrator,184 requested an interview with the Home Secretary to ask for the application of Rule

243a to Pankhurst and other political offenders. The Home Office sent a junior official to tell her

that the request could not be granted. In his report, the official wrote that Cole and her two

associates said “they represented a movement which would fight for this principle, which they had

won as suffragettes.”185 He disparaged them, “I saw many of these women in the old suffragette

days and these are just the same—obsessed with the one idea that they are right and that it is their

duty to fight for the recognition of the principle.”186 Pankhurst and Cole invoked the suffrage

movement when petitioning Rule 243a, as both a source of pride and as an appeal for consistency.

Having “fought for” the rule then, they considered it logical to apply the rule in this instance.

However, among the government, it is precisely this suffragette identity and its connotatively

gendered characteristics, “hysterical” and “obsessed,” which they derided in their discussion of

the petitions.

With the Rule 243a petitions rejected, Pankhurst completed the rest of her prison sentence

and was released a month early on “good behaviour.” At 7:45 am on Monday, May 31st, 1921,

Dreadnought members led a largely female group to rally outside the Holloway prison gate

awaiting Pankhurst’s release.187 They waved red banners and sang “The Red Flag.” It was raining

as she emerged from the prison. Various publications like The Daily News, The Times, and The

Scotsman reported that “she looked grey and wan, and appeared to find it difficult to walk.”188 As

184 E. Sylvia Pankhurst, The Home Front, (London: The Cresset Library, 1987), p. 330. 185 TNA, HO/144/1697/414256, “Prison Department memo of interview with Miss Cole,” Feb. 25, 1921 (internal Home Office letter). 186 Ibid. 187 “Welcome to Sylvia Pankhurst,” Workers’ Dreadnought, May 21, 1921. 188 TNA, HO/144/1697/414256, The Times and The Daily News, May 31, 1921 (clippings); “Miss Sylvia Pankhurst Out of Prison.” The Scotsman (1921-1950), May 31, 1921,

52

her supporters assisted her towards a taxicab, she told a reporter that she had spent four months of

her sentence in the hospital division. Not strong enough to eat the typical prison diet, she was fed

only milk and eggs.189 Pankhurst took the opportunity to criticize the prime minister’s unawareness

“of the way in which political prisoners are treated” and again pointed out that suffragettes had

been allowed privileges which political prisoners like herself were now denied.190

As mainstream media emphasized Pankhurst’s frailty and victimization, her own

newspaper celebrated her resilience and path toward victory. In anticipation of her release, the

Dreadnought published a front-page article on May 28th, entitled “A Woman’s Welcome to

Comrade Sylvia Pankhurst on Release from Holloway, May 30th.”191 The article championed her

as a model: “only through a spirit of great self-sacrifice, the enthusiasm and zeal of the real

revolutionary who sees the goal…, can attainment… be won.”192 The immediate issue published

after Pankhurst’s release on June 4th dedicated the entire front page to an article in which she

recounted her prison life and platform for reform. Prominently featured below the headline was a

drawing of Pankhurst emerging from prison and captioned “TO FIGHT AGAIN ! Comrade Sylvia

Pankhurst.”

http://ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/login?url=https://search.proquest.com/docview/478988694?accountid=10226. 189 TNA, HO/144/1697/414256, The Daily News, May 31, 1921 (clipping). 190 “Sylvia Pankhurst Released,” The Manchester Guardian (1901-1959), May 31, 1921, http://ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/login?url=https://search.proquest.com/docview/476470766?accountid=10226. 191 “A Woman’s Welcome to Comrade Sylvia Pankhurst on Release from Holloway, May 30th,” Workers’ Dreadnought, May 28, 1921. 192 Ibid.

53

Figure 1.193 Figure 2.194

The drawing merits extended comparison with a suffragette pin Pankhurst had designed

for the WSPU. As Winslow aptly describes, the pin presented a young woman “in flowing Grecian

robes striding out of a prison over broken chains” and flanked by doves in flight. The design

Winslow observes was “rooted in nineteenth-century, Pre-Raphaelite socialist symbolism”

influenced by William Morris.195 Though Pankhurst did not draw the Dreadnought sketch,

significant similarities between the two enrich understanding of Pankhurst’s characterization and

role amidst the 1920-1921 sedition episode. Pankhurst created the WSPU emblem during the phase

of high militancy in which suffragettes, including herself, were conducting hunger strikes,

subjected to forced feeding, and continuously released and re-imprisoned. The emblem’s

allegorical suffragette emerging from prison in victory for suffrage and for prison reform found

her successor in a resplendent “Comrade Pankhurst” exiting prison, head held high, to “fight

193 Workers’ Dreadnought, June 4, 1921. 194 “The Woman’s Suffrage Campaign,” Inspiring Women: Hidden Histories, from West Kent, Knowledge Transer Project, accessed February 4, 2018, https://www.kent.ac.uk/sspssr/womenshistorykent/themes/suffrage/. 195 Winslow, Sylvia Pankhurst, p. 17.

54

again” for communism, free speech, and prisoner’s rights as silhouetted rank-and-file members

shuffle towards the gaol gate.

In the following Dreadnought issue, Pankhurst fused these two characterizations of frail

victimization and allegorical victory to dramatic effect. She continued her editorial “Prison Life,”

containing a list of sincere demands for prison reform justified by a sympathetic but condescending

depiction of destitute inmates. She recounted an episode at Holloway pending her Rule 243a

petition decision in which the governor had allowed her to use tooth powder in contravention of

prison regulations. Since none of the other prisoners could use it, her usage evidently “caused quite

a sensation in the prison.” However, she assured readers that “they expressed no jealousy. Their

attitude was that of the thief crucified beside Christ, who protested: ‘This man has done nothing

amiss.’”196 Amplifying this self-depiction as Jesus was another Dreadnought article describing

Pankhurst’s post-release breakfast. At the “small, almost devotional party,” it read, “a De Vincian

figure at the long table of the quaint Eustace Miles’ Restaurant, pale, frail, yet flushed with

happiness at being out of prison and amongst friends, Comrade Pankhurst spoke briefly of her

prison life, without hatred, in a voice mellowed by sorrow.”197

Pankhurst’s imprisonment and activities upon release coincided with the formation of a

united Communist party and Pankhurst’s rapidly fading influence within it. Pankhurst entered

Holloway immediately after her appeal on January 5th. The Unity Convention, held January 29th,

felt Pankhurst’s absence. Graubard describes the convention as a “humdrum affair” with right-

wing communism clearly dominant in the proceedings.198 It resolved, in contravention of

Pankhurst and other left-wing communists, to fully embrace the precepts of the Third International,

196 “Complimentary Breakfast,” Workers’ Dreadnought, June 4, 1921. 197 “Prison Life,” Workers’ Dreadnought, June 11, 1921. 198 Graubard, British Labour and the Russian Revolution, p. 138.

55

particularly the acceptance of parliamentary tactics and Labour Party affiliation. Kendall aptly

suggests that while Pankhurst nominally supported unity, “her arrest in October and subsequent

imprisonment made it less likely that personal conflicts would cause any hitch in the

arrangements.”199 Before the January Unity Convention, the Dreadnought published articles

discussing anti-parliamentarianism, trade unions, and other unity issues. But without Pankhurst at

the helm to personally raise funds, the Dreadnought slipped further into debt.200 The group reached

out to Alexandra Kollontai, a prominent internal critic of Lenin’s regime, for funding.201

While Pankhurst and the Dreadnought had joined the CPGB, she made little effort to

adhere to a group which had formed in her absence. Indeed, L. J Macfarlane and Martin Durham

both cite Pankhurst’s eager and frequent publication of Kollontai’s Bolshevik criticism as a

significant factor in her expulsion from the party.202 The party expelled Pankhurst and the

Dreadnought in September 1921, only four months after her release from prison. While she

remained committed to her own conception of communism in the period following her release, her

attention was shifting to a literary lens that would characterize the late 1920s for her: she tried to

open a “red” salon with her Italian anarchist lover in 1924, and then began writing a series of

lengthy books on topics as diverse as India, a “universal” language, and national maternity policy.

When evaluating Pankhurst’s extremely high levels of hunger-striking and forced feedings

(“more than most suffragettes”), Winslow suggests Pankhurst courted martyrdom to establish

herself as “the most self-sacrificing Pankhurst.”203 Hunger-striking during the Cat and Mouse Act

199 Walter Kendall, Revolutionary Movement, p. 266. 200 Kendall, Revolutionary Movement, p. 266; Winslow, Sylvia Pankhurst, p. 168. 201 Winslow, Sylvia Pankhurst, p. 168. 202 L. J. Macfarlane, The British Communist Party. Its Origin and Development until 1929 (London 1966), in Martin Durham, “British Revolutionaries and the Suppression of the Left in Lenin's Russia, 1918-1924,” Journal of Contemporary History 20, no. 2 (1985): 210, http://www.jstor.org/stable/260531. 203 Winslow, Sylvia Pankhurst, p. 45.

56

period enabled her to win over sympathetic media. Newspapers like The Suffragette, The Standard,

The Morning Post, and The Daily Herald all published Pankhurst’s vivid depiction of forced

feeding in the spring of 1913, in which she named the seven other suffragettes also force fed.204

And in 1914 she declared her intent to conduct hunger, thirst, and sleep strikes to (successfully)

secure a deputation with Prime Minister Asquith, claiming that he “will find it hard to persevere

in his refusal… when he knows that unless he relents another human being will die.”205 Writing to

his friend about Pankhurst’s intention, announced just two weeks after suffragette Emily Wilding

Davison had died at the English Derby after throwing herself onto the race track, Asquith stated

that “I don’t want, if I can help, to secure [for Pankhurst] the martyr’s crown, but que faire?”206

This prewar suffrage context was fundamentally different from that in which Pankhurst

found herself in 1921. The WSPU (to say nothing of the less controversial and constitutionalist

National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies) reached a peak membership of 5000, with more

than 1000 members arrested from 1905 to 1914. And of those, around 240 went on hunger strikes

from 1909-1914.207 Within these large sizes of general membership and prisoners, supportive

networks existed to turn the WSPU into, as one suffragette put it, “a sympathetic family helping

each other to endure.”208 Prisoners organized communal entertainment activities to the extent

possible, while outside members coordinated large, periodic rallies outside Holloway.209 While

contemporaries then and historians now have debated the ultimate help or hindrance of militancy

204 TNA, HO/144/1558/234191, The Suffragette, The Standard, The Morning Post, and The Daily Herald, Mar. 26, 1913 (clippings). 205 “June 10th,” Woman’s Dreadnought, June 13, 1914. 206 M. Brook & E. Brook, eds, H. H. Asquith, Letters to Venetia Stanley, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 89, in Winslow, Sylvia Pankhurst, p. 72n112. 207 Gay L. Gullickson, “Emily Wilding Davison: Secular Martyr?” Social Research 75, no. 2 (2008): pp. 463, 465, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40972072. 208 Daisy Dorothea Solomon (n.d. 1909?) My Prison Experiences, leaflet reprinted from the Christian Commonwealth, 25 August 1909, p. 7, in Purvis, “The Prison Experiences of the Suffragettes,” p. 111n54. 209 Purvis, “The Prison Experiences of the Suffragettes,” pp. 111-12.

57

towards women’s suffrage, what it aimed, as Holton claims, was the engagement and expression

of militants’ self-realization and their individual and collective exertion of will onto society.210

This 1920-21 sedition episode illuminates the limitations of Pankhurst’s attempt to

transplant this political identity past the pre-war suffrage period into the postwar. Pankhurst’s

prison release in May provided her with the opportunity to transfigure the different personas she

drew upon in those months—dying victim, victorious heroine, prophetic communist—into an

apotheosis of “true” martyrdom. Pankhurst presented herself as a Christ figure defying both the

Pontius Pilate judgement of the government leadership and the Judas betrayal of other communists.

But this image lost its prewar effectiveness without the institutional strength of the WSPU and the

wider support of suffrage: the WSF/CP(BSTI) barely numbered among the few hundred, and its

advocacy of Parliamentary overthrow was not even accepted by other communists. Crucially,

overall national sentiment had shifted. The “antipathy towards mass emotion” resulting from the

First World War, Riley explains, was “devastating for the standing of militant feminism.”211

Evoking prewar misogyny of the “easy martyrdom of these highly strung, neurotic ladies,” various

government officials in “these critical times” derided Pankhurst as a “hysterical woman in feeble

health.”212 Though previously forced to accommodate suffragettes, the government now risked

little in outright rejecting the demands of a comparatively isolated radical during a postwar period

of unrest and emergency rule. As described earlier, Pankhurst’s strategy received tepid response

from fellow communists who disciplined her for political dissent before subsequent expulsion.

Pankhurst’s activities afterwards, salon hosting and literary authorship, began to “fit” the type of

political celebrity she ineffectively invoked in this sedition case.

210 Holton, “In Sorrowful Wrath,” p. 12. 211 Riley, Am I That Name, p. 60. 212 See pages 47-48, notes 169-170, and page 50, note 182.

58

Conclusions

Months after Pankhurst’s release from prison in 1921, Silvio Corio wrote to author Bernard

Shaw, a friend of Pankhurst, asking for financial support for their operations. Himself facing

financial difficulties, Shaw condescendingly responded:

I have known for some time past that Sylvia is in difficulties; … though I am quite as much disposed to make a spoiled child of her as the rest of her friends I am not really sorry that she should lose a toy so expensive and dangerous as a printing press, and have a spell of total abstinence from Weltverbesserungswahn [the illusion of world improvement].213

His answer reflected what those in Pankhurst’s social circle who were not identically radical to her

felt: exhaustion at Pankhurst’s unyielding political agitation for her causes. Yet, years later, after

having received the Nobel Prize for his play Saint Joan, Shaw was invited by the BBC to speak

on Joan of Arc’s “500th Anniversary of Martyrdom.” In the half-hour broadcast, he defended

Joan’s extraordinary greatness and suggested that if one wanted “to find what women can feel

when they have the whole power of society marshaled against them, and they have to fight it as it

were,” then one should consider Pankhurst and the suffrage movement. “Miss Sylvia Pankhurst,”

he continued, “like so many other women in that movement, was tortured: in fact, except for the

burning, she suffered many actual physical tortures that Joan was spared.” He advised that reading

Pankhurst provided a much better depiction of Joan’s trial than the “very dry historical

accounts.”214 Shaw’s substantive turn of opinion towards Pankhurst is emblematic of the polarizing

evaluations of her life that have proliferated among her contemporaries and later historians.215

213 George Bernard Shaw to Corio, in Romero, Portrait of a Radical, p. 154n68. 214 “Inquisition Persists, Says Shaw In Radio Address on Joan of Arc,” The New York Herald Tribune, May 31, 1931, https://search.proquest.com/docview/1114187824/abstract/9BCAB3DC5F194E8EPQ/1?accountid=10226 215 With the vast scope Pankhurst’s life already difficult to comprehensively address, her biographical accounts have become minefields of personal agendas and personal attacks. For example, see: Patricia Romero, review of Sylvia Pankhurst: Sexual Politics and Political Activism, by Barbara Winslow, The American Historical Review 103, no. 1 (Feb. 1998): p. 195, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2650835; Rita Pankhurst, “Sylvia Pankhurst in perspective: Some comments on Patricia Romero’s biography E. Sylvia Pankhurst: Portrait of a radical,” Women’s Studies International Forum 11, no. 3 (1988): p. 245,

59

In this respect, this thesis has offered Sylvia Pankhurst’s final arrest and prison sentence as

an examination of the dynamics between radicalism, gender, and censorship in interwar Britain.

Pankhurst shared a reciprocally antagonistic relationship with the government, and it changed over

the course of her life. During the suffrage movement, the government treated Pankhurst, as a

militant hunger-striker and member of the Pankhurst family, with contempt. In response, Pankhurst

published editorials and delivered speeches denouncing the oppression she and the other

suffragettes experienced. After the outbreak of war, Pankhurst devoted herself to home-front relief

and pacifism, demanding the government institute equal pay for women workers and end

conscription. Although the government treated anti-war positions as existential threats to the

country, Cabinet dismissed Pankhurst as “represent[ing] no important body of public opinion.216

After the war and the Russian Revolution, Pankhurst viewed the capitalist and imperialist state no

longer as a tool to begrudgingly wield, but solely as an obstacle. As the government scrambled to

contain domestic and foreign communist activity, it derided Pankhurst as a joke.

But her influence remained disproportionately large. Although Pankhurst’s organization

had dropped to only a couple hundred members in the postwar from its peak before the war, it kept

an active presence in East London with smaller branches elsewhere in Britain. The Dreadnought

kept a weekly circulation, publishing the work of prominent European intellectuals and promoting

a variety of the organization’s events. Pankhurst maintained her vast social connections, frequently

travelling throughout Britain and Europe. Pankhurst was the first contact by the Third International

for establishing its British section. As a result of the influence Pankhurst wielded, both fellow

communists and the British government had to treat Pankhurst with more significance than they

https://doi.org/10.1016/0277-5395(88)90139-2; and Jane Marcus, “An Activist’s Activist,” review of E. Sylvia Pankhurst: Portrait of a Radical, by Patricia Romero, The Women’s Review of Books 4, no. 8 (May 1987): p. 12, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4020055. 216 TNA, CAB/23/3/13, “War Cabinet meeting minutes,” Sept. 1917 (meeting minutes).

60

would have preferred. Inkpin’s pro-parliamentary British Socialist Party outnumbered Pankhurst’s

Workers’ Socialist Federation by more than a factor of ten, yet Russia insisted on a unification as

inclusive as possible. Similarly, while the Special Branch laughed at the prospect of Pankhurst

uniting the British communists, it actively tried to prevent Pankhurst’s visit to the Congress of the

Third International in Moscow. And it wasted no time raiding the Dreadnought office and arresting

Pankhurst for sedition as it sought out Veltheim, Springhall, and McKay.

Ultimately, however, Pankhurst’s political celebrity, the culmination of her political

activism, proved to be a liability. Filtering her beliefs through a 19th century romanticism inspired

by her father and developed with her fellow militant suffragettes, Pankhurst operated on personal

convictions and expressed them through artistic and religious vocabulary. She was an individual

that stood as part of, as well as outside, the collective. During the suffrage movement, the

prominent middle- and upper-class women of the WSPU mobilized this identity to their

satisfaction, achieving widespread recognition (positive or negative) and forcing the government

to treat them as a significant movement.

But by 1920, the environment had completely changed. Although Pankhurst’s organization

remained female-led, Pankhurst was engaged in postwar issues dominated by men: communist

politics, military unrest, and industrial disputes. To some extent, she attempted to adapt. In the

Dreadnought, she published the articles of men like Veltheim, McKay, and Springhall. They

provided insight into revolutionary activity, racial tensions among the London dockworkers, and

discontent within the British navy. In her appeal trial, she drew upon language of “scientific

principles” and “doctrine” to publicly explain her communism.

Yet Pankhurst continued to use the suffragette strategy and aesthetic, and both communists

and the government rejected it. During the trial and imprisonment, she evoked the suffragette

61

identity of sacrifice and suffering. To be sure, the physical damages of her suffrage hunger-striking

impacted her health during the 1921 prison sentence, and the debilitating prison conditions and

inadequate medical support only exacerbated Pankhurst’s hardship. But her attempts in prison to

appeal to a suffragette legacy and her self-presentation in the Dreadnought upon release as a Christ

figure could not achieve the result she sought. The government was contemptuous of the

suffragette movement it had had to accommodate, and it subsequently found no reason to do so

with a comparatively isolated woman representing a radicalized working-class group. Similarly,

Pankhurst’s religious and feminine strategy elicited little support from the other British communist

parties which, already disliking Pankhurst personally and politically, tried to emulate Lenin’s

atheist and masculine Bolshevism.

Beyond Pankhurst’s life, this sedition episode raises issues anchored in Edwardian and

interwar history. 100 years since the 1918 Representation of the People Act, the aftermath of the

suffrage movement remains a critical element within the period’s broader context. In particular, it

is worth considering the impact of suffragette organizations like the WSPU, which drew members

into an ideologically charged and tactically hyperactive environment, on its members’ lives beyond

the movement. As Sylvia promoted leftist radicalism and international pacifism, Emmeline and

Christabel rallied jingoist support for the war and later respectively joined the Conservative Party

and an American Seventh-Day Adventist movement. Other suffragettes like Mary Richardson and

Sophia Duleep Singh joined fascist and Indian women’s suffrage movements. Like Sylvia, other

suffragettes and suffragists such as Dora Montefiore, Helen Crawfurd, and Ellen Wilkinson

pursued left-wing radicalism. The extent to which they were able to forge roles for themselves,

and the legacy of suffrage in their approach to ideology and tactics, are important factors for

contextualizing women’s participation in radical movements and politics generally.

62

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